BECOMING
AND
BEING
Autobiographnical/Biographical
Sketches
Copyright
©
1982–2012
John
O'Loughlin
_______________
CONTENTS
PART
ONE:
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL
SKETCHES
1.
Sex
2.
Becoming
a
Writer
3.
Becoming
an
Irishman
4.
Do
I
Take
My
Politics
Seriously?
5.
How
I
Relate
to
my
Mother
6.
Am
I
the
New
Messiah?
7.
Literary
Influences
8.
Musical
Tastes
9.
What
Kind
of
Writer?
10.
How
Do
I
View
My
Future?
PART
TWO:
BIOGRAPHICAL
SKETCHES
11.
John
Cowper
Powys
12.
D.H.
Lawrence
13.
Aldous
Huxley
14.
Hermann
Hesse
15. Albert Camus
16. Jean-Paul Sartre
17. Arthur Koestler
18.
19. Henry Miller
20. George Orwell
APPENDIX
_______________
PART
ONE:
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL
SKETCHES
SEX
I
have
never
had
sex
with
a woman, or, for that matter, with
anyone else. At twenty-nine (29) I
remain a virgin [the same is still true at fifty-one (51), my age at
the
current revision of this text], though I'm not by nature asexual. I have always desired sex with a woman, but
haven't had the good fortune to encounter anyone suitable.
Poverty and isolation in a depressing area of
north
The only kind of sex I
have been accustomed to over the years is the sublimated sexuality to
be
obtained from 1) fantasies; 2) wet dreams; and 3) pornography and/or
erotica. I am a regular fantasist,
rarely omitting to fantasize from 10-15 minutes either before I go to
sleep at
night or after I wake up in the morning.
However, during the day I refrain from fantasy altogether. I have other and more important things on my
mind!
Occasionally I get a wet
dream, but I don't derive much pleasure from it, as a rule. The context in which it takes place may be
one that privately disgusts, frightens, or alienates me.
Besides, the emission is rather uncomfortable
to live with. I usually apply a paper
tissue
to the sheet and/or my lower abdomen, and then attempt to get back to
sleep
again. Wet dreams almost invariably wake
me up!
Masturbation is another
matter, but not one that I'm greatly thrilled by, and these days I
hardly ever
indulge in it. I used to derive more
pleasure from it when I was eighteen or nineteen. The
ejaculation
was
then
much
more
forceful,
the pleasure so much keener, as Gide would say, in consequence. Now I find it something of an anticlimax and
am privately disgusted! I would usually
masturbate over a sex magazine once I had found a suitably alluring
photograph,
and hold a paper tissue at the ready to collect my sperm.
I often found the rear view of a woman more
alluring than the front, because I derive much pleasure from the sight
of a
seductive rump. A photograph in which
rump, anus, vagina, and thighs were collectively on display was likely
to
appeal more strongly to me than any alternative perspective.
But I didn't masturbate
very frequently, in fact no more than once
or twice a
month on average, since it both disgusted and humiliated me. After the act I normally felt regret,
thinking to myself that I must be mad and am only conditioning myself
away from
natural sex, which is not going to make it any easier for me to get a
woman,
should I ever be in a position to afford one.
Living on the bread-line is, I suppose, the main reason why I
did not
get a woman, because poverty and shame combined to preclude one from
approaching anyone. Besides, I'm in the
paradoxical position of essentially being middle class by birth and
therefore
not finding working-class women particularly attractive.
There is, I know, a deep-seated psychological
reason for this, which derives from the fact that my father effectively
married
beneath himself and suffered the consequences, including separation or,
rather,
the fact that he ran-out on my English-born mother even before I was
born and
she ended-up, when the business she and her mother were running finally
collapsed, dragging me away from Galway City, the town of my birth, to
an
upbringing in Aldershot, of all places, which I found both solitary and
painful. When I add to this the fact
that my mother was the daughter, on her father's side, of a
Protestant-turned-nominal-Catholic
from Donegal who left home to join the British army (contrary to his
parents'
wishes), then there is also a tribal conflict involved somewhere
beneath the
surface, which in part explains my aversion to Englishwomen, as well as
throws
some light on my parents' inharmonious relationship.
Unlike my mother, who is pro-British, I am
essentially Irish, and not disposed to repeat my father's mistake,
which, as I
see it, was to marry the wrong woman on both class and ethnic grounds
without,
initially, being in the least aware of the fact.
No man is ever wholly a
writer. He is also a private individual,
a private human being. The writer is one
part of me, the person another. Thus
while the writer will advocate sublimated sexuality and speak out in
defence of
masturbation vis-à-vis pornographic stimuli as a more civilized,
because
artificial, mode of heterosexuality than conventional sex, the private
person
will often feel disgust with masturbation and harbour certain
misgivings about
his sex life. The private person desires
to find a woman, to lead a fairly normal sex life, while the writer, or
philosopher, continues to develop his thoughts along ever more
progressive, and
hence artificial, channels, scorning conventional criteria. Thus there arises in me a disparity between
writer and person which is the source of much internal conflict, as
professional thoughts and personal feelings tend ever further apart. To what extent the former influences the
latter, to what extent the private person is conditioned
by the
writer, it isn't of course possible for me to say.
But there must be some influence, some
conditioning, from the one to the other which contributes to keeping me
solitary and, by natural standards, perverse.
The private person
suffers from a chronic depression due in part to celibacy, in part to
solitude,
in part to environment (north London being uncongenial to him), and so
on, and
knows that he will only get rid of this depression if he radically
changes his
lifestyle and perhaps gives-up writing altogether.
But the writer goes from strength to strength
by extending the domain of the artificial, or transcendent, in every
fresh
work, and so continues to derive profit from the private individual's
hardships. One cannot fully serve two
masters at once, even when they are housed in the same person. Either the writer profits at the private
person's expense, or vice versa. For me,
the former situation has long been the case and although, with my
depression,
solitude, etc., I am one of the most unhealthy, unfortunate private
people on
earth, I'm undoubtedly one of the greatest writers, probably the
leading
philosophical writer of my generation, though, of course, I have not
been
recognized as such by the Irish-wary British!
I was discussing my sex
life, such as it is, and should remark that while the private person is
often
disgusted by fantasies, wet dreams, and masturbation, the writer, by
contrast,
draws a certain satisfaction from them, as attesting to the fact of his
spiritual superiority. To masturbate
over a men's magazine or vis-à-vis a sex video is not so much to
pervert
oneself, the writer reasons, as to indulge in a higher mode of
sexuality, in
which sex has been transferred, in large part, from the body to the
head, from
the senses to the spirit. Instead of
feeling quite as disgusted as he might otherwise do, the private person
is
invaded, as it were, by the writer at such times and consequently
induced to
modify his feelings in the direction of spiritual pride or even moral
righteousness. The others, the mere
average
mortals, are coarse and sensual sinners who would have a long way to
evolve
before they could expect to become like oneself
-
wholly given to sublimated sexuality.
The writer believes that, since life is a process of evolution
from
undiluted sensuality at one extreme to undiluted spirituality at the
other,
pornographic sex, involving masturbation and/or voyeurism, is a step in
the
right direction, not simply an inducement to perversion.
The private person may have his depression
and loneliness but, nonetheless, the writer still intrudes into his
thoughts
and feelings from time to time, thereby making his acquiescence in
pornographic
sex less psychologically disturbing than might otherwise be the case. The writer obliges the private person to
admit that if he doesn't always feel happy about his use of
photographic
erotica, it is largely because he is still too naturalistic and
sensual, at
heart, to be content with nothing else.
It becomes a kind of spiritual failing on his part ... that he
should
prefer the prospect of natural sex to the actuality of artificial,
sublimated
sex.
I don't wish to dwell on
the interaction between writer and private person any longer, nor, if I
may be
permitted an allusion to Hermann Hesse, on the 'Steppenwolfian'
difficulties it
can entail, not least in respect of a sort of split-personality. Suffice it to say that if the writer becomes
too domineering, the actual life of the private person may well be
endangered,
if not destroyed. The writer cannot
survive without the private person's consent, yet neither,
paradoxically, can
the private person survive if he isn't also, or at other times,
supplemented by
a professional, whether writer or otherwise.
That I have survived as both writer and
private
person ... is a fact in large part due to my personal cunning.
BECOMING
A
WRITER
I
did
not
want
to
become
a writer until 1972, when I was twenty
(20). Prior to then, I had wanted to
become a musician, and had assiduously practised both guitar and piano
in the hope
of one day either joining a progressive rock band or getting such a
band
together myself. Why I changed my mind
in 1972, I don't exactly remember; though it probably had something to
do with
the fact that I first fell in love that year and started writing poetry
to
commemorate the fact. Probably I half
wanted to become a professional musician for another two years, though
I can
distinctly recall telling a friend, in late 1973, that I had absolutely
no
desire to either join a band or get a band together myself. By then, I must have become dedicated to a
literary career.
My first excursion into
writing took the form, as I intimated above, of lyric poetry, which
isn't
altogether surprising really, since most youths who are in any way
disposed to
literature begin by writing verse. At
the time, I was a humble clerk in the
I left my job partly for
health reasons and partly because the pay was relatively poor. But I also left it because I had long
nurtured a private ambition to do something better with my life, and
writing
seemed, in view of the relative paucity of alternative jobs for someone
like
me, by far the best bet. But I didn't
succeed in finding a publisher for my first novel when it was completed
three
months later, and I continued to write in vain thereafter, whilst all
the time
becoming more depressed. I briefly
returned to my old clerical job at the ABRSM the next year, having
persuaded
the manager to re-employ me. But by then
I was suffering too much from a stomach ulcer and a variety of other
personal
and domestic problems to be capable of staying in the job for very
long, and
so, once again, I handed in my notice, conscious, as never before, of
the
degree to which I had changed, in the meantime, and effectively become
a
writer.
Thus in November 1977,
after barely six weeks back as a clerk, I found myself on the dole
again, and
that is where I still remain at the time of writing this little
autobiographical sketch, nearly five years later. In
that
time,
or
rather
from
June 1976 to
July 1982, I have written several works, which have all been typed-up
by me in
due course. They include novels, essays,
dialogues, short prose, and various other projects of a like-literary
nature. I have not had one of these
works published, though I've continued to send or to take typescripts
to
publishers on a regular basis. I don't
believe that they were rejected because of poor quality but, on the
contrary,
because of superior quality, which is to say, because of too radical
and
theoretical a mould. Had I been writing
adventure stories, thrillers, detective novels, or whatever, the
outcome might
well have been different. But, partly no
doubt because of my Southern Irish origins, I was always too
intelligent and
noble, too deep and, as the British would see it, 'thick', a person to
be
capable of writing, in an overly commercial vein, for popular
consumption. Thus I have experienced a
fate apparently
reserved for all or most outstanding writers, the fate Schopenhauer
alluded to
in his writings and which men like Baudelaire and Nietzsche also
experienced. I'm not in the least
ashamed of this fact, for it testifies to my intellectual integrity and
moral
superiority over lesser, i.e. commercial, writers.
I am morally and creatively beyond the
bourgeois establishment, and have accordingly been rejected and
outlawed, as
though a subversive threat, whilst inferior intellects have been
accepted and
praised. I came to the conclusion that
my works were not wanted in
BECOMING
AN
IRISHMAN
I
was
born
in
Be that as it may, I
hated
I grew to like his
family, which included two younger brothers and a younger sister by his
father's second marriage, and they evidently grew to like me. For when they moved to a more rural part of
But my dependence on his
family wasn't to last beyond 1973. For
just before Christmas of that year I was told that there wasn't enough
room in
the house for everyone and that, as Christopher's two younger brothers
and
sister were growing up, I would have to seek alternative accommodation. Thus, with scant prospects of suitable
accommodation in Merstham or surrounding areas, I had no option, once
again,
but to return to my mother's slummy lodgings in
Be that as it may, if my
previous dislike of Finsbury Park had been strong, my subsequent
dislike of it,
following a spell in rural Surrey, bordered on deep disgust and
loathing, and
it wasn't long before I began to feel the first needles in my scalp of
the
tension depression to which, with my high-strung ascetic nature, I have
since
grown so painfully accustomed! I wanted
desperately to return to Surrey but, unfortunately, such contacts as I
once had
in the Sutton-Carshalton-Wallington areas had gradually been eroded
during my
stay in remote Merstham, and I accordingly knew that there was no-one I
could
now depend on to sound-out the accommodation situation in my absence. Even the office colleague who had previously
supplied me with the 'Croydon Advertiser' had in the meantime left the
office,
and I felt that travelling down to Surrey myself would prove both
costly and
futile, since the chances were that any vacant rooms I could afford
would have
been snapped up long before I got there and sounded-out the local
papers, or
that I would have had to wait in line to view a room on a different day
from when
I originally phoned about it, thereby necessitating a repeat trip, and
so
on. Thus I felt I had no option but to
look for alternative accommodation in north London, and after a few
desperate
months at my mother's flat, which overlooked one of the busiest and
noisiest
roads in the area, the ever-busy Stroud Green Road, I moved into a
relatively
cheap bedsitter in nearby Crouch End - the first of several such
bedsitters I
was destined to inhabit there.
All this time I was
growing conscious of a change coming over me. For I was not now simply an English youth
with an Irish name, as I had previously somewhat foolishly and even
naively
considered myself to be, but an impersonal outsider or stranger in
north London
with an Irish name, and this was already a step in the direction of
altering
the psychology of my ethnic allegiance.
There were tens of thousands of Irish people in the Borough of
Haringey
and consequently no reason for anyone of English descent who was
familiar with
my name, from letters, parcels, election cards, library tickets, etc.,
to
regard me as an Englishman. Overnight I
was just one more Irishman and, as such, a 'paddy', an outsider, an
immigrant,
and, paradoxically, a 'catholic' all over again.
But this didn't dawn on
me all at once, nor alter my writings to any appreciable extent. For I still wrote more as
an Englishman than as an Irishman for several years - certainly up
until 1981. The solitude imposed on
me by an intense
dislike of the urban environment in which I was trapped gradually led
me to
feel increasingly isolated from the past, however, and thus to identify
more
with the solitary Irishmen I saw about me than with the English, who
were
usually in company. I even began to see
myself as an immigrant, though I had spent most of my life in
Another factor besides
isolation from my past which contributed to the change in my psychology
was the
fairly frequent letters I was now receiving from one of my Galway
aunts, a
lifelong spinster, who wrote about family affairs and also put me in
touch with
a certain Mrs Connolly, an old friend of hers, who lived in nearby
Palmers
Green. Although I didn't visit Mrs
Connolly more than three or four times a year, the fact that she was
the only
person I ever visited doubtless contributed to my becoming an Irishman,
since
she would generally speak to me of Irish affairs, both personal and
public, and
thereby slightly condition my psychology.
Add to this the fact that, for a number of years, some of my
immediate
neighbours have been Irish and that I have lived in fairly close
proximity to
Irish people ever since moving to Crouch End, and the gradual shift of
ethnic
or national allegiance on my part becomes more understandable.
DO
I
TAKE
MY
POLITICS
SERIOUSLY
(?)
At
first
glance
this
may
seem
a strange question to ask of myself,
and yet there is a good reason for asking it.
The reader will recall that I wrote about the disparity between
the
private person and the writer, a disparity in which the latter thrives
at the
former's expense. Is not the political
bias I have in my writings, which is generally that of a socialistic
transcendentalist, connected with the writer, and does not this radical
writer
thrive at the private person's expense?
Yes, I am constrained to answer that he does!
For the private person is really rather
depressed and conscious of the fact that he is out-of-place in an urban
environment such as the one he's currently living in.
This individual says to himself: I would not
now be in this fix if it wasn't for the fact that I've been stuck in
north
The writer has become a
socialistic
radical with revolutionary sympathies, but I, the private person, am
terribly
depressed and in need of a better deal.
Yet the writer is really a consequence of the fact that I don't
get that
better deal. He is a usurper, and what
he says, while there may be some truth in it, is said in consequence of
private
misfortune, the bad luck which tore me away from my provincial roots
and
obliged me to endure north
Yet while this soul may
not take the writer's politics too seriously, the writer most certainly
does,
and for the very sound reason that he writes about it and develops it
as he
progresses in his chosen vocation. The
writer knows what he is saying to be valid, even if it isn't
necessarily
relevant to the private person, the perverted provincial with
middle-class
sympathies, who yet retains an inkling of his suburban roots. The writer reminds this latter person that
Lenin and Trotsky were also perverted provincials in their private
souls, and
so too, if to a lesser extent, were Goebbels and Hitler.
And the writer knows that, as the
professional soul, it is his opinion and allegiance that really count,
since
politics is a profession and therefore not something aligned with the
personal
predilections or preferences of the private person.
But one can't very well
be a successful politician with a chronic depression, and so the
writer's
professional allegiance is still hampered, so to speak, by the sorry
condition
of the private person. If the latter is
sick, then the former can't expect to operate successfully or properly
in the
event of his becoming a politician. He
is, after all, a usurper, a creature that should never have been. The return to full mental health of the
private person, brought about by an appropriate change in living
conditions or,
more specifically, environment, may well result in the modification or
even
destruction of the writer, with his radical politics.
Yet what had been written at the private
individual's expense would still remain, and he would have an extremely
difficult task proving it wasn't valid in itself!
Thus whatever happens in
the future to the private person, the writer's work will remain, and it
will be
that work, rather than any subsequent modified political thinking,
which would count
for most in radical circles. The private
person, returned to health through the acquirement of suburban
privileges,
might well disown it, but he could never refute it!
And if he became known for it, he would have
no option but to take a stand on it, since the exceptional man must
always put
his professional self, or persona, before his private self, or person,
in such
matters, not be dictated to by the latter.
Even if, through reconditioning imposed by his return to a
provincial
lifestyle, the private person didn't particularly approve of what the
writer
had written, he could not deny it was true.
Private misfortune may have led to the writer's writing it, but
the fact
that it was written is the most important thing, whether or not a
perverted
provincial was involved! Evolutionary
progress often depends on such strange quirks of fate.
Were not men of exceptional intelligence and
moral integrity occasionally 'pulled over', through force of
circumstances, to
the proletariat's side, it is doubtful
whether they
would by themselves achieve very much vis-à-vis bourgeois oppression. For, as a rule, they aren't particularly
bright!
HOW
I
RELATE
TO
MY
MOTHER
Not
that
I
wish
to
deny
that there is proletarian blood in my
veins. For, thanks to
my mother, there most certainly is!
If my father was the son of middle-class intellectuals, or Irish
national schoolteachers, then my mother was most definitely the
daughter of
proletarians - her father having gravitated from being a private
soldier to a
regimental sergeant-major (RSM) in the British Army.
Even now there is much of the
sergeant-major's daughter about my mother, what with her habitual
disposition
to words like 'blinkin'', 'bloody', and 'bleedin''.
Her mother, as already noted, was a Catholic,
but it's essentially after her father that she takes, having strong
Protestant
sympathies, if no accompanying religiosity.
As I would seem to take after my father (though I never knew him
personally) in ethnic allegiance - and indeed it's usually the male
parent who
conditions both the class and ethnic allegiance of his offspring,
particularly
when of the same sex - there has never been much understanding or
sympathy
between my mother and myself. Rather, I
have mostly despised and disliked her, taking umbrage at her
pro-British
mentality whilst I, especially of late, have developed a more
consistently
pro-Irish one.
But the gap that exists
between us over ethnic identification is no less conspicuous where
culture is
concerned; for while she has never displayed the slightest inclination
for
serious culture, I have long been a devotee of it, having spent many
years
immersed in various of the fine arts, both as a spectator and as a
participant. Not once has she shown any
inclination towards either serious music or literature, and I can only
conclude
that what is best in me, i.e. my intellectual and cultural interests,
stems
from the legacy of my late father, who must have possessed or inherited
a
capacity for higher things. That I
should be so spiritually different from my mother ... is often a source
of
amazement to me, though just as often one of considerable pain and
humiliation
as well! To have nothing in common,
intellectually or culturally, with one's mother is indeed a grave
misfortune,
and I am quite baffled that a person as given to higher matters as
myself, who,
besides being no mean scholar, has become one of the greatest
self-taught
writers and philosophers of all time, should have emerged from the womb
of such
a confirmed philistine! Perhaps, after
all, woman is little more than the carrier of a man's seed, the bearer
of 'his'
child? If so, then it could certainly
explain why the offspring inherit their father's surname, not to
mention
nationality, being, in effect, extensions of him, and most especially
where the
male child is concerned.
No, I don't approve of
the way my mother usually speaks, nor of her habit of showing off as
much of
her legs as possible to her West Indian husband, as she lolls in her
armchair
in front of the television, an epitome of sensuous abandon. She is a vulgar, ignorant person, and I have
never been particularly at ease in her company.
My father, although a failure by the professional standards of
his
parents, married beneath himself, on ethnic as well as class terms, and
I, more
than anyone, have had to bear the consequences!
This is the main reason why, on no account, would I wish to
inflict a
similar fate on anyone else. I would
rather spend the rest of my life alone, leaving the ordinary
working-class
girls of Crouch End and nearby areas to others.
I'm sufficiently equated with solitude by now not to have any
doubts on
this matter. An attractive proletarian
may be tempting from time to time, but after the sex had run its dreary
course,
there would be long silences, agonized cultural and intellectual
incompatibilities, even the possibility of ethnic rivalries along
Irish/British
or Catholic/Protestant lines, as one discovered no real spiritual
kinship to
exist. Better to make do with one's own
company than run the risk of enduring that!
AM
I
THE
NEW
MESSIAH
(?)
There
is
a
strong
argument
for
assuming that I am such a man, and
it derives in large part from the quality of my religious writings, as
evidenced, in particular, by those appertaining to my philosophical
literature. I'm not a crank to imagine
myself literally
Jesus Christ come down from Heaven, or anything of the sort! If I loosely correspond to a Second Coming, a
Messianic equivalent, it's because people will discover that the best
of my
writings pave the way for a new, higher religious orientation, and that
I may
well qualify as the next saviour in the line of evolutionary ascent, so
to
speak, after Christ for the Western peoples and, indeed, the world at
large,
insofar as Buddha, Mohammed, and other such religious leaders were
approximately equivalent to Christ, and could only be superseded on
terms
identical to my own.
I'm not by nature a vain
person but a truthful one, and so I wouldn't hesitate to consider the
possibility of my being the new and, in some sense, ultimate religious
leader,
if my work seemed to indicate as much.
After all, I'm well qualified to step into the role of messiah,
since,
as the reader will have learnt, I have never made love to a woman but
lived in
celibacy since the dawn of puberty.
Anyone who approximates to a Second Coming is unlikely to be a
lecherous
individual, with a known record of sexual indulgence behind him! I do not say that I have enjoyed my celibacy,
much less the solitude that goes with it, but circumstances, ethnic and
otherwise, have conspired to force them upon me and the outcome, like
it or
not, has been a succession of literary works of unprecedented spiritual
insight
and achievement - works, in all probability, which wouldn't have been
possible
under any other terms!
Well then, the work is
done, or nearly so [I was wildly off the mark here in 1982], and if
it's ever
to be read in the future, people will be obliged to admit, as they now
admit
about Nietzsche, that its author was an exceptional individual who
evidently
lived under most unusual circumstances.
Whether or not his subsequent life deviated from those
circumstances to
any extent ... wouldn't affect the quality of the work already done,
which
should correspond to the status of Messianic teachings, as relative to
a Second
Coming equivalent. That the 'new Christ'
began as a saint and gradually became a sinner ... would not, were that
to
actually transpire, amount to a condemnation or refutation of his work
in an
age as de-mystified as this, when no-one can reasonably be expected to
be
superhuman or divine. I don't know
whether or not I shall have the luck to find a suitable woman, but I
doubt that
I would remain celibate just for the sake of bolstering my Messianic
status. The depression I live with is
surely a sufficient argument against that!
And yet, if I remain
poor because my work, necessarily radical, is unlikely to find a large
following in my own lifetime, then the chances of celibacy remaining my
fate
are pretty high, and my Messianic reputation will doubtless receive a
posthumous boost in consequence. Whether
I could in fact now acquire a woman, even if I were in a position to do
so, is
itself a debatable point, since my past conditioning and moral
intelligence
combine to make me a pretty spiritual individual whose spirituality may
well
intrude between his sensual interests and his human integrity. One does not, of course, know everything
about oneself, no matter how introspective one may happen to be. Moods change, and so too, from time to time,
do circumstances. It is better, I think,
to keep an open mind.
But if my celibacy
partly qualifies me to step into the role of a new messiah, then so,
too does
the fact that I don't smoke or drink, and have not done so for several
years. Neither do I eat more than I need
to survive, since copious or expensive food would be beyond my pocket,
and I'm
obliged, in consequence, to limit myself to frugal take-always. My sleep is light and, as a rule, fairly brief. I doubt that I ever get more than 4-5 hours
sleep a night and I have never slept during the day, finding it
impossible to
do so. I have lived for a number of
years in north
So there are, besides my
writings, a number of reasons why I'm highly qualified to correspond to
a
Second Coming and be equated with a new messiah, destined to supplant
the
Christian one, with the termination of humanistic civilization and the
inception of post-humanistic civilization.
The age would seem to be ripe for the return of a major
spiritual
leader, even though the old civilization has yet to end and the new one
to
officially begin. That the former
civilization will reject my teachings ... I don't doubt.
But, then, not every Western country is fully
aligned with it, least of all
LITERARY
INFLUENCES
I
have
read
a
great
many
books since 1972, the year I first began
to systematically collect them, but the authors who have had the most
influence
on my literary and spiritual development are comparatively few in
number and
mainly of philosophical tendency. I list
below those whom, for one reason or another, I consider to have had the
most
influence on me, namely: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Emerson,
Aldous
Huxley, Teilhard de Chardin, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hermann Hesse, Arthur
Koestler,
Malcolm Muggeridge, Bertrand Russell, Henry Miller, Oswald Spengler,
Carl Jung,
and Lewis Mumford.
There are authors whom I
have read more for enjoyment than instruction, and these include:
Lawrence
Durrell, Thomas Mann, J.R.R. Tolkien, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, James
Joyce, W.B.
Yeats, Ezra Pound, de Nerval, Montaigne, Poe, Wilde, Maupassant,
Hamsun, and
Flaubert. There are yet others whom I
have largely read for instruction but subsequently turned against and
condemned
in my thoughts or writings. To some
extent this applies to most of those in the first category, but it
applies, in
particular, to authors like D.H. Lawrence, André Gide, Tolstoy, John
Cowper
Powys, Wilhelm Reich, Albert Camus, George Orwell, and Thomas Hardy,
largely
because I disapprove of their neo-paganism in opposition to
transcendental
progress. Lawrence is, it seems to me,
especially culpable in this regard, and so, to a significant extent, is
Powys,
whose philosophy of nature worship (he called it 'Elementalism')
embraces a
two-faced allegiance to the First Cause!
I seem to recall that my
first adult reading took the form of poetry, and that, from there, I
slowly
gravitated towards novels. Since 1980,
however, I have read mostly philosophies, art books, histories,
political and
literary biographies, autobiographies, and travelogues.
My taste for literature, in the strictly
narrative sense, appears to have declined during my late twenties. For these days I rarely have a novel in my
hands. Yet I keep a list of all the
books borrowed from the local library, together with the date of
borrowing, so
that I am able to verify the exact nature and tendency of my tastes
(see
appendix). When I have read a book I
particularly enjoyed or admired, I put an asterisk (*) against the
title on my
list, the better to recall my impression of the book at a later date. There are now, in my notebook, some thirty
pages of books listed in this way, with about twenty titles to a page. If I get to put 6-10 asterisks on a page, I
consider myself relatively fortunate. It
means that I have borrowed fairly discerningly and tastefully from a
library in
which, like all libraries, there are thousands of books one wouldn't
wish to
read.
I gave up buying books
some time in 1976. I had about 350
paperbacks in my private collection and little room on the shelves of
my modest
bedsitter bookcase for any more. But the
following year, due in large part to a desire to enliven my life
following a
lengthy illness which had kept me from writing, I decided to dispose of
all but
my very favourite, so whittled my collection of paperbacks down to
about
thirty, which are still with me at the time of writing.
They include: Baudelaire's Intimate
Journals, Hesse's Steppenwolf, Joyce's Ulysses,
Miller's Tropic
of Cancer, Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Sartre's Nausea,
Camus'
A Happy Death, Huxley's The Doors of Perception &
Heaven
and Hell, Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and Hamsun's Mysteries. I hang-on to these books but I don't re-read
them. They bear little resemblance to my
current tastes and have long ceased to exert any real influence over my
writings.
Indeed, although I speak
of influences, I should stress that most of my work is original, having
developed from my own inner world, not been imposed upon it from without. Of course,
no-one is completely free of influences, but rarely will it be the case
that a
genuine writer is dominated by them. I
know myself to be a genuine writer, for I am of sufficient independence
of mind
and intellectual integrity, and have been practising in my chosen field
for a
sufficiently long period of time to become both increasingly original
and
technically proficient. Naturally, this
doesn't guarantee popularity or acclaim, since one's
independent-mindedness may
well make one too frank, progressive, sophisticated, or whatever, to be
acceptable to the generality, whether bourgeois, proletarian, or
anything
else. I know this fact only too well,
bearing in mind that England is ever the home, despite monumental
exceptions to
the rule, of literary mediocrity, and creative outsiders, such as
myself, who
pride themselves on being professional rather than amateur, or
fastidious
rather than slapdash, or 'artists' rather than 'jobbers', could only be
relatively taboo. One feels that no
matter what one writes, sooner or later one will be writing something
which the
publishing insiders won't be able to countenance, and that one will
therefore
have one's work rejected or, at best, bowdlerized.
One is conscious of being a kind of spiritual
giant among spiritual pygmies, outlawed for belonging to that
exceptional
category of men whose intelligence and temperament could never permit
them to
become stooges of bourgeois commercialism.
At times it is tempting to wish one were a painter or a composer
rather
than a writer, because they at least work in comparatively impersonal
terms and
can get away with almost anything, whereas the medium of language
exposes the
nature of one's thought to all kinds and degrees of bourgeois
repression,
especially when that nature is both political and religious, and hails
from an
ethnic basis which, being Irish, is virtually anathema to the country
of one's
residence!
But I have not succumbed
to bourgeois pressures, and neither, I dare say, will I ever do so. There is, at any rate, a degree of
consolation to be gleaned from the fact that, from time to time,
outsiders have
broken
through the Establishment's opposition to their work or existence and
created
their own, higher order beyond the bounds of convention.
What they have done before us, we, too, can
do in the future!
MUSICAL
TASTES
My
dichotomy
between
the
private
person
and the artist can be
brought back here, since it applies in some measure to my musical
tastes, which
are comprised of fairly disparate elements.
On the one hand, I'm a modern jazz enthusiast [this is not quite
as true
in 2004 as it was in 1982], having developed a taste for this music out
of my
earlier taste for blues and rock. On the
other hand, I'm a lover of classical music, and have recently extended
my taste
for instrumental compositions into the realm of opera.
The first taste pertains, in my estimation,
to the private person, relaxing from his day's labours; the second, by
contrast, to the artist, who likes to keep in touch with whatever is
most sought-after
in the fine arts. And the two tastes are
ever kept apart, not clashing in successive appreciation but ...
listened to
quite separately at an interval of at least three hours.
Thus it may happen that,
early in the evening, I like to listen to modern jazz for some forty or
so
minutes, whilst I reserve my professional taste, so to speak, for later
on -
usually from between ten and eleven o'clock.
The private person is glad of the reprieve from creative
concerns that
the artist indulges in every day, and so relaxes with the help of
modern
jazzmen or fusion musicians (the two are not quite identical) like
Herbie
Hancock, Carlos Santana, John McLaughlin, Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke,
Wayne
Shorter, Larry Coryell, George Duke, Al DiMeola, Jean-Luc Ponty, Barry
Miles,
Jan Hammer, and so on - a veritable host of talented musicians whose
records he
takes a pride in collecting, even if, through force of financial
circumstances,
he can only buy such records second-hand, and therefore at a reduced
price, once
or twice a month. Nevertheless, despite
his financial constraints - the fruit, in large measure, of being a
radical
writer in a conservative country - he has collected over two-hundred
records
and takes a perverse pride in being able to purchase quality music on a
comparatively economic basis, knowing full-well that there are plenty
of people
who buy absolute rubbish for anything up to four or five times the
amount he
normally pays.
But now comes the turn
of the artist, and he relies exclusively on the record department of
Hornsey
Central Library for his regular supply of instrumental and operatic
recordings,
which come completely free-of-charge.
Lately he has discovered the genius of Albern Berg through his
wholehearted
appreciation of Wozzeck,
undoubtedly
one
of
the
greatest
twentieth-century
operas. But he has already acquainted
himself with other such masterpieces as Tosca, Lady Macbeth of
Mtensk,
Eugene Onyegin, Manon, Carmen, Boris Godunov, and Faust. He prides himself on reading French, German,
Italian,
and Russian, and is always glad of an opportunity to expand his
knowledge of
these languages through the detailed perusal of a good libretto.
There are other works,
however, which he has disdained; but these I shall refrain from
mentioning. At least he has been able to
acquaint himself with opera through the library, and so acquired a
fairly
discriminating taste in the matter. He
prefers, as a rule, to stick with late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century
operas, and the same applies to instrumental works, which he is also
keen on
borrowing. But he despises ballet and
rarely if ever listens to piano sonatas or chamber music, particularly
string
quartets - the constant scraping of stringed instruments and monotonous
tones
of which simply bore him. No, of
instrumental forms, it is the symphony and the concerto which have most
appealed to him, the large ensembles of instruments making for a
textural and
tonal variety not to be encountered in lesser forms.
Of twentieth-century composers he must list
Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Honegger, Glazunov, Martinu, Walton, Poulenc,
Berkeley, Vaughan Williams, Shoenberg, and Tippett among his
favourites, while
the nineteenth-century composers who have had the most appeal for him
include
Liszt, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Borodin, Mussorgsky, Saint-Saëns,
Rubenstein,
Rimsky-Korsakov, and Brahms.
Probably the composer
who has compelled his admiration more than any other is Shostakovich,
the
majority of whose symphonies have won his wholehearted approval for
their unmistakable
originality, richness of invention, clarity of purpose, and ingenious
orchestration. Particularly notable in
this respect are the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth symphonies, the 'Holy
Trinity' of Shostakovich's symphonic oeuvre, only paralleled (if at
all) in
modern music by Prokofiev, a composer ranking second only to
Shostakovich in my
estimation, and one who, together with Khachaturian, constitutes for me
a part,
as it were, of the 'Holy Trinity', or troika, of contemporary Russian
music.
Yes, the artist in me
has derived considerable pleasure from much of the music of these great
composers, both as regards the symphony and the concerto in each of its
usual
forms. I can never understand people who
go out of their way to criticize the great works of these men, instead
of being
grateful for what they are hearing or have heard. They
strike
me
as
being
too
pretentious and
hard-to-please, and are often victims of an envy stemming from creative
impotence. On the other hand, a man like
Henry Miller, who was always more ready to praise than find fault,
seems to me
infinitely preferable to these critical devils whose negativity, did
they but
know it, is rather a symptom of malice born from an inability to
appreciate
what they are hearing. In
sum,
a
typically
Old
World,
and in particular English,
shortcoming, suggestive of spiritual feebleness and/or decadence.
No, I will not presume
to find fault with those composers whose music has given me so much
pleasure,
even if, by dint of historical circumstances, it falls short of
perfection. Better to look on the bright
side as much as possible, admitting that one would never be able to
emulate
them oneself. And this goes as much for
the
great British composers of the twentieth century, like Elgar and
Walton, as for
the Russians. We are fortunate, despite
certain drawbacks, to be alive in such a richly creative age,
inheritors of the
finest music ever composed. Not for the
more enlightened of us to turn our backs on this music with a
Spenglerian
disregard for musical evolution! Liszt
was not the last voice in great music, and neither was Shostakovich, as
far as
the twentieth century was concerned. The
terms of musical value change for the better, not, as a rule, for the
worse! And this applies not only to music,
but to all the fine arts. If this were
not so, how could we continue to live, and what would be the point of
our lives
here? It is only because the best is
still to come that we are justified, as artists, in continuing with our
respective creative efforts. Only a
lunatic would purposely go out of his way to create something
artistically
inferior to what he had already done!
WHAT
KIND
OF
WRITER
(?)
It
has
been
said,
and
in
connection with no less a writer than
Hermann Hesse, that the worse the man the better the artist, with an
implication that the more morally degenerate one is ... the better are
one's
chances of succeeding as a modern artist.
Yet this idea, understandable as it may be for a certain type of
mediocre artist, is totally false where any great artist is concerned. For the genuine artist is not a scoundrel or
criminal, but a kind of spiritual antenna of the race, a discoverer of
higher
truths, and thus someone in the vanguard of man's spiritual evolution. To imagine the contrary is simply to settle
for less than the genuine artist. It is,
in fact, to identify artistic merit with the average sensationalist
writer,
whose speciality is not to illuminate the world with higher spiritual
insights
(which, naturally enough, such a writer wouldn't in any case possess)
but,
rather, to drag the reader through all kinds and degrees of filth only
too
common to the world, in the hope, no doubt, of disgusting or
frightening or
titillating him in the process! Such a
philistine writer may well be a bad, morally irresponsible,
unenlightened,
degenerate type of man, but he won't thereby be a great artist. Simply another commercially viable
shit-monger!
No, although Hermann
Hesse was doubtfully the greatest of artists, he wasn't as bad a man as
some people,
more usually of a critically negative turn-of-mind, may like to imagine. If he distinguished himself above the
majority of his contemporaries, it wasn't because he was a particularly
evil
man but ... simply more intelligent and gifted than them, and therefore
an
exceptional man. Now such a man may well
be assisted in his chosen career by dint of the fact that his personal
circumstances were worse, either consistently or over intermittent
periods of
time, than a majority of his contemporaries; for, as already noted,
it's only
at the expense of the individual that the artist thrives.
This is clearly so, to a significant extent,
in Hesse's case, and of course it also applies to me, since I could not
have
attained to certain spiritual insights had my personal circumstances
been any
better. Thus the worse, within certain
acceptable limits, the man's personal circumstances, the higher the
chances of
his becoming a great artist, because one cannot have the best of both
worlds,
but must necessarily make sacrifices on behalf of the artist if one
wishes to
distinguish oneself in that respect.
However, if one's
personal circumstances are too bad, then there can be little prospect
of a
great artist emerging. One must at least
be able to continue writing on a regular basis and in relative comfort,
with a
roof over one's head and some food on one's plate every day. A tortured being isn't likely to produce
great art but, at best, a pathetic wail!
To
return, then, to my autobiographical sketch.
I am clearly the kind of writer whose
achievements are due, in some measure, to personal hardship, since
without
these personal deprivations, which include depression and solitude in
an alien
environment, I would never have continued writing - at least not in the
same
vein as before. I don't say that I would
have 'sold out'; but I might well have been tempted to make more of the
literary, illusory side of my work at the expense of its philosophical
content,
bowing to phenomenal objectivity with something approaching the
selfless
philistinism of your average novelist.
But now I am, par
excellence, a philosophical writer, whose duty is to expand
the domain of truth to the extent that he can, whether or not other
people
approve of it. This writer does not
sensationalize or aim for a popular market, like the sham writer, but
is
dedicated to the furtherance of literary progress in a world largely
indifferent to higher things. He knows
that the artist's success in this matter is inextricably bound-up with
the
individual's asceticism, and that unless the private person leads a
saint-like
existence ... there is no possibility whatsoever of the artist's
achieving
anything demonstrably significant.
Depression, poverty, solitude, celibacy, isolation ... all these
and
more contribute to the artist's growth, no matter how abhorrent they
may seem
to the private person. Van Gogh and
Nietzsche became great for similar reasons, and it's almost
inconceivable that
anyone should become so on any other terms.
The smug bourgeois writer has his limitations as an artist,
brought
about, in large measure, by personal affluence.
And this is true not only of the more obvious examples, like
Evelyn
Waugh and Thomas Mann, but also to a lesser extent of writers like
Hermann
Hesse, Aldous Huxley, and Jean-Paul Sartre, who, although
distinguished, could
have become still more so, in certain respects, had their personal
circumstances been any worse!
I do not, however, say
that I would wish to continue exactly as before, a victim of poverty,
depression, solitude, etc. For if things
go on as they have been doing much longer, I may not be able to write
at
all! No, I'm fully aware that artistic
progress in me was achieved at my personal expense, largely against my
natural
wishes. Having completed a substantial
body of work in this way, I am now all in favour of giving the personal
self a
better deal ... should circumstances subsequently permit.
HOW
DO
I
VIEW
MY
FUTURE
(?)
Clearly,
I
cannot
continue
in
my
current tracks for ever, since my
deteriorating personal circumstances are unlikely to take a turn for
the
better. It is difficult enough to
write
now, what with a depression that gets steadily worse, and typing I can
only
manage if I take a ten-minute break every twenty or so minutes, which
allows
time for the build-up of tension in my head to subside slightly [this
isn't as
much the case in 2004 as it was in 1982].
Being depressed in this way is not the same as being mad, though
it
would be easy for other people to think so!
The lifestyle one is obliged to lead, with a certain number of
regulated
breaks, is by no means natural, but one does at least remain in
possession of
one's faculties and can thereby tell right from wrong.
I may have to take a ten-minute break between
listening to one long-playing record and another, but I can at least
listen to
it. I may not be able to read
consistently beyond twenty minutes, but at least I can read, if
intermittently. Thus I know very well
what my position is, as also what needs to be done to remedy it. The trouble is that knowing what needs to be
done and actually being in a financial position to do it ... are two
completely
different things!
My future, therefore,
must be different from both my past and my present.
I don't see myself writing for much longer,
let alone for the rest of my working life, since, even given the
deteriorating
state of my mental health, I have said most of what needs to be said to
effect
an upgrading of religious truth in the world over the coming decades. To a large extent my literary task is now
complete. For I have attained to the
truth to an extent unprecedented in literary history, and can't expect
to go
very much beyond it. I can perhaps
refine on some details in the years ahead, but I cannot expect to
radically
extend the scope of my writings.
Besides, I'm not a writer in the strict literary sense but a
philosopher, propagandist, and teacher who disdains
mere belle
lettres. My
possible destiny as a new messiah would not enable me to fit
complacently into
the role of homme de lettres, which, in any case,
is a
role I personally despise. To be
disposed to scribbling out novel after dreary novel for forty-odd years
... I
would have to be a lesser man than I feel I am, since literature
carried out for
no other reason than itself strikes me as a relatively inconsequential
pursuit,
only suitable to a mediocre and cowardly type of man who lacks either
the
courage or aptitude for a higher calling.
If I now knew that I was destined to be a writer all my life, I
would
feel quite humiliated, judging such a fate unworthy of my knowledge in
certain
other matters!
No, for me, writing is
simply a means to an end, a task that had to be embraced in order that
I could
discover the truth about God, religion, politics, society, etc., and
then set
about the higher task of getting that truth implemented.
I may not have viewed it like that at the
beginning, but its subsequent development leaves me with little or no
choice in
the matter, since what I say could never be countenanced by the
bourgeois
establishment. Thus, if I have no future
in writing, I may at least have one in politics which, if successful,
could
lead to the subsequent implementation of the Truth and to the adoption,
by the
people, of superior criteria in religion, politics, art, etc.
But a future in politics
would probably necessitate a return to
PART
TWO:
BIOGRAPHICAL
SKETCHES
JOHN
COWPER
POWYS
Of
all
twentieth-century
authors,
John
Cowper
Powys was surely the
most prolific. From a traditional
fictional standpoint he was also probably the most gifted, though
doubtfully
the most profound. He was like an
inexhaustible well of creativity from whom book after compendious book
flowed
with a spiritual generosity more reminiscent of the Middle Ages than of
our
own, somewhat more academic and scientific time. He
was
no
miser
where
literary
production was
concerned, and neither could he be described as lazy, he who must have
got
through more words than any other three major authors combined! Indeed, so quickly and fluently must he have
written, that one might well describe his technique as spontaneous, and
define
him as a bourgeois/proletarian author after the mixed-class fashion of,
say,
D.H. Lawrence.
But if spontaneity is a
hallmark of much proletarian writing, the subject-matter of Powys'
novels and
philosophical works must mark him out as a bourgeois author, and not
one of the
most enlightened bourgeois authors either!
For although he was never a Christian, in the strictly
devotional sense
of that word, he was a long way from being a transcendentalist -
indeed, such a
long way as to be essentially neo-pagan and somewhat Rousseauesque in
character.
Yes, there was a rather
old-fashioned and even reactionary streak about Powys, which led him to
identify with Rousseau and nature-worshippers generally.
He espoused the doctrine of 'Elementalism',
or controlled nature-worship, in pursuance of a dual, positive/negative
attitude towards the hypothetical First Cause of all Creation, which
others
might equate with God the Father or Jehovah, depending on their
religious
persuasion. This First Cause, which
Powys wisely preferred not to anthropomorphize, was allegedly the fount
from which
all pain and pleasure, sadness and happiness flowed, and should be
regarded, in
his estimation, with an appropriately dualistic attitude of defiance
alternating with gratitude, as the occasion warranted.
Such was the base of Powys' religious faith, and
he remained its faithful adherent to the last.
Thus he remained orientated towards the galactic-world-order in
deference to the diabolic creative and sustaining force behind all
life, which
more perceptive intellectuals would equate with solar or stellar energy
without, however, deigning to anthropomorphize it, like a Christian.
Whether Powys found his
twenty-year stint in
As a philosopher Powys
was never more than popular, given by natural inclination to practical
philosophy, with its hints to the common man as to the wisest conduct
of life
in the natural environment. His work
thus ranks fairly humbly in the hierarchy of philosophical writings. For applied philosophy inevitably falls short
of the academic brand, its emphasis being utilitarian rather than
intellectual,
something to live by rather than to think by.
Had Powys been a better man his work would doubtless stand
higher in the
hierarchy of philosophical writings. But
his closeness to nature ensured that he remained one of the Devil's
most
fervent disciples - a thoroughly heathen type of spiritual bourgeois!
Of all his works, the
ones I've been least able to abide are the novels, partly because of
their
inordinate length in a majority of cases, but partly, too, because of
the way
in which they are written and the level of thought they generally
contain. I have already referred to the
obvious
fluency of technique, which in itself need not arouse any critical
hostility,
as a quasi-proletarian dimension in Powys' novels.
But their inordinate length, which must be
tied-up with a spontaneous approach, is quite the reverse of a
proletarian
dimension, being, if anything, closer to medieval aristocratic
materialism. Only a bourgeois of extreme
reactionary cast would write novels in excess of seven-hundred pages. For the bulk that results from such a length
guarantees a degree of voluminous materialism, in the published book,
far in
excess of anything commensurate with proletarian criteria of spiritual
progress. Only a bourgeois of Powys'
mentality could have equated spiritual greatness with extreme length of
a
novel. For, in reality, evolutionary
progress demands that as the spirit expands, so the material aspect of
writing
contracts, resulting in shorter books of superior spiritual insight. Powys' novels lacked both slenderness and
superior
spiritual insight, and are therefore of a relatively inferior quality
from any
strictly transcendental standpoint.
Given that the level of
thought in the average Powys novel, like A
Glastonbury
Romance, is
pretty low, fit only for humanistic or pre-humanistic (pseudo-pagan)
mentalities, the style in which they are written can be no less
distressing,
especially when involving the overly parochial or colloquial idioms of
a Penny
Pitches or a Tossie Stickles or even a Mr Weatherwax!
Here Powys reveals himself to be worse than
culturally reactionary; simply realistically old-fashioned in one of
the most
embarrassingly sentimental, patronizingly ninnyish sort of provincial
ways. The photograph of him on the cover
of The Art of Happiness with a pair of carpet slippers on his
feet, a
long-eared, soppy-looking pet dog on his lap, and a scruffy old jacket
thrown
over his shoulders ... just about typifies the provincial mentality of
the
author of such illustrious fictions as Penny and Tossie!
I do not want, however,
to end this first biographical sketch on a wholly negative note; for if
Powys'
novels have never made an agreeable impression on me, I have at least
retained
some respect for The
Meaning
of
Culture, which - not excepting the biographical
and polemical brilliance of Suspended Judgements - is arguably
his most
accomplished philosophical work. Not
that I can agree with everything or indeed much of what is said in it. But the style in which it was written still
impresses
me after so many years, and I occasionally dip into it to savour
English prose
at or near its very best. He wrote this
book in the
D.H.
D.H.
Lawrence
was
much
the
most
bourgeois/proletarian author of
all the major English literary figures to emerge during the first-half
of the
twentieth century. By which I mean that,
technically, he was a proletarian author whose style was more radically
spontaneous than that of any of his contemporaries, including John
Cowper Powys,
and betrayed a more naturally proletarian tone than could have been
found in
essentially bourgeois authors who occasionally created proletarian
characters
and settings. But if he wrote as a
proletarian, much of his thinking and, indeed, the novelistic context
in which
he worked, was distinctly bourgeois, though of a less radically
reactionary
order than the 'back-to-nature' thinking of, for example, John Cowper
Powys. For while 'back
to sex', as
There was, of course, an
element of 'back to nature' in
One cannot argue,
however, with his findings. What marks
Lawrence out as a devil's advocate is that he chooses to draw the wrong
conclusions from them, and thus rebel against the 'corrupting
influences' of
urban civilization, instead of to see in the thwarting of natural
instincts a
means whereby nature could be overcome in the interests, ultimately, of
higher
spiritual development. There was no room
for the idea of such a higher development in
Nietzsche remarked
somewhere on the danger to the development of truth that the rise of
the common
man would entail if given the means to express himself.
Perhaps more than any other twentieth-century
author, Lawrence expresses that very danger in confirmation of the
Nietzschean
fear. The son of a collier, he remained
to the end of his life a victim of the darkness, a prisoner of
subconscious
domination. You cannot turn the son of a
collier into an intellectual gentleman just by educating him; for an
intellectual gentleman is as much the product of heredity as of
upbringing or
education - possibly more. Unlike Aldous
Huxley, D.H. Lawrence wasn't naturally disposed to think in terms of
the light,
the superconscious mind, the spirit.
Everything reverted to the darkness for him, and that is why he
advocated the 'dark gods of the loins' as being preferable to any
spiritual or
transcendent god. Even though he was
aware of a distinction between soul (as body) and spirit (as
intellect), his
strongest inclination was for the soul, which he considered superior to
the
spirit. So, no doubt, would many other
less-evolved types, whether primitive, pagan, neo-pagan, or whatever. One cannot be surprised that Lawrence's basic
sympathies lay with the primitive, or that he should have endeavoured
to
establish his own existence on a pseudo-primitive footing, like a
belated
Pre-Raphaelite. In this, however, he
proved himself to be an abject failure; for even Lawrence was to some
extent a
product of bourgeois civilization and thus dependent for both a living
and
spiritual self-satisfaction on his writings.
Neither could he forsake the writings of other men, including
many of
his contemporaries. He remained, to the
end of his life, an intellectual, if at times a rather soulful and
sensual one!
His temperament,
somewhat Byronic in its egotistical individualism, wasn't a
particularly
ingratiating one, and few of his contemporaries seem to have liked him
or to
have enjoyed his company. Some disliked
him for what they saw as his bohemian, restless, informal, slovenly
lifestyle. Others found him impertinent,
quick-tempered, impatient, self-opinionated, cynical, and a variety of
other
unflattering things besides! He was
certainly a rather ugly man, quite the most unattractive romantic of
his
generation, and, in all probability, he suffered a chip-on-the-shoulder
in
consequence. He completely lacked a sense
of humour in his writings, as in his life - a fact which could hardly
have
endeared him to would-be detractors! His
earnestness was of that plebeian variety which bespeaks poverty and
social
inferiority. Also, as
already noted, in the service of sex.
The effort to translate this basic class earnestness into
intellectual
terms proved largely unsuccessful, since the result was unconvincing. He remained a victim of ancestral deprivation,
never more convincingly so than when bewailing the fate of the common
man. He did this in a number of novels,
not least
of all Lady
Chatterley's
Lover.
As a poet, Lawrence's
technical progress was not meagre; for having begun his career as a
rhyming,
versifying, bourgeois type of poet, he in due course forged one of the
most
essential, free styles of poetry to appear in the first-half of the
twentieth
century, a style going way beyond anything attempted by W.B. Yeats in
the
general direction of technical freedom.
But whereas the free verse of his late period is technically
meritorious, the general content of the poems sadly leaves something to
be
desired. For it is usually of an
anti-progressive, naturalistic tendency, as in that poem where he
bewails the
fact that modern men are becoming so many 'monkeys minding machines'. No doubt, the 'men' whom Lawrence would have
preferred us all to become would be natural doers rather than
artificial
be-ers, active lechers rather than passive ascetics!
Quite often one reads
Lawrence with a patronizing tolerance for his stylistic shortcomings,
deeming
them inseparable from his humble origins and taking an almost
paradoxical
pleasure in the fact that he can express himself as well as he
sometimes
does. This is the way a 'man of the
people' writes, one tells oneself, and because he is
such a man
one cannot allow oneself to become too critical of his stylistic
limitations,
such as his constant repetition of certain words (not alien to writers
like
Hemingway either), his limited vocabulary, his seemingly slapdash
approach to
grammar, and so on. A novel like Kangaroo
particularly lends itself to this impression, since at times it is so
carelessly written and thematically unconvincing as to threaten to fall
completely apart. One wonders where he
got the nerve or patience to continue writing it! On
the
other
hand,
one
can
find oneself
admiring the more carefully-structured and artfully-written work of a
novel
like Women in Love, which Lawrence evidently took some pains
with. In this, as in The Plumed
Serpent, the
artistry at times attains to a degree of merit which brings out the
converse
impression of the condescending one - namely puzzlement as to how a
'man of the
people' could have written so
well as
this?
Undoubtedly, Lawrence
was one of the most technically uneven writers who ever lived, the
victim in
part of an unstable temperament, in part of his constantly changing
domestic
circumstances. If there was a creative
constant in him, it had to do with his opposition to modern
civilization and,
not least of all, the avant-garde attitude it often entailed. For all his technical freedoms and/or
limitations, Lawrence persisted in the literary tradition of
story-teller. His philosophizing was an
aspect of his
story-telling, not the raison
d'être of his novels - as in the case
of the more sophisticated Aldous Huxley.
He disliked Huxley's novels, and we can surmise that their
disrespect
for conventional story-telling was a factor in his negative response. As also, of course, their
penchant for intellectual philosophy and highly artificial tone. There existed, however, a degree of mutual
respect between Lawrence and Huxley, but it was essentially the respect
of
opposites, not of kindred spirits. By
the time of his death, no man could have been spiritually farther apart
from
the naturalistic philistinism of Lawrence than Aldous Huxley. Huxley ascended transcendentally, whereas
D.H. Lawrence sank to the lowest mundane level of sensual faith!
ALDOUS
HUXLEY
This
distinguished
grandson
of
T.H.
Huxley
began his literary
career as a cynical young bourgeois decadent mocking the foibles of his
time,
and ended it on the cautiously optimistic note of one who had faith in
better
things to come. Not that he became a
proletarian author in any strict sense of the word; for he was always
too conscious
of his bourgeois origins to be capable of an exclusively transcendental
approach to writing. Beginning as a
bourgeois author in Europe, he later became a bourgeois/proletarian one
in the
United States, dedicating himself to the (posthumous) Beyond rather
than simply
to the collapse of bourgeois civilization.
Whether or not he attained to the Clear Light of the Void at
death ...
must remain a somewhat debatable point.
But he was certainly at a far remove from the social cynicism of
Antic
Hay
and Point Counter Point by then!
Many of the best
literary minds agree that Huxley's most important work was done in the
United
States, and so I believe it was. For on
the West Coast of America his spiritual life blossomed as never before,
and he came
into his own as a bourgeois/proletarian author, dedicated to things of
the
spirit. Even then, however, there were
serious limitations to Huxley's spirituality, strange shortcomings in
his
concept of the Beyond. He was quite
convinced of a posthumous salvation or, rather, the reality of
posthumous
salvation, and even wrote a novel in which one of his own character
projections, Eustace Barnack, is confronted, at death, by the Clear
Light and
finds himself unable to abide it, in consequence of which he is
obliged, under
the law of reincarnation, to return to the world in order to improve
his
karma. This novel, Time
Must
Have
a
Stop, showed Huxley to be greatly interested in and
considerably
influenced by works like The Tibetan Book of the Dead and
Eastern
mysticism generally. It wasn't just a
gimmick of his, as some critics have fatuously contended, but a serious
interest which he persisted in right up until his death, when,
convinced that
posthumous salvation lay to-hand, he availed himself of two separate
shots of
LSD in order to assist his passage into the Other World.
He died the day that President Kennedy was
assassinated, and died, we are informed, in the most peaceful fashion,
sustained by his faith in the Clear Light and encouraged towards a
peaceful
merging with this transcendent manifestation of spiritual beatitude by
his
second wife, Laura, who behaved towards him similarly to the way that
he had
behaved towards his first wife, when she had been in the throes of
dying and
apparently had need of mystical encouragement.
There can be no doubt that Huxley was in deadly earnest
concerning the
possibility of a posthumous salvation; for it was not like him to
indulge in
gimmicks or to be sceptical about a belief in which he had become so
interested
and which formed a pivot, so to speak, for his creative inspirations. From our point of view, his earnestness may
seem a trifle bizarre, even crazy, but there can be no question that he
took
his mysticism very seriously. At times a
shade too seriously, if what his second wife revealed in her journals
about his
fear of the consequences of being unprepared for union with the Divine
Ground
is to be believed! It was as though he
not only believed in a posthumous salvation, but in a posthumous
damnation as
well - quite in the paranoid spirit of a medieval Christian!
But if Huxley
effectively became something of a Buddhist crank, he nonetheless
remained
fundamentally a bourgeois. For the
substitution of one traditional world religion for another doesn't
alter one's
class integrity but, rather, confirms the decadence of things falling
apart
from the (Christian) centre, to paraphrase Yeats. His
belief
in
posthumous
salvation
was
quite
respectable from a bourgeois standpoint, even if founded on oriental
rather than
occidental symbolism. He did not cross
that fateful borderline which divides bourgeois thinking from
proletarian
thinking and proceed to a level of thought in which all possibility of
a
posthumous salvation, of whichever kind, is dismissed as a delusion. It never occurred to him that salvation, when
and if it did materialize, would only come at the culmination of
evolution,
following the transformation of men into supermen, and the supermen of
the
lower millennium into superbeings, and the superbeings of the higher
millennium
into spiritual globes, and the spiritual globes of the heavenly Beyond
into the
omega absolute, or something to that effect.
No, such a level of thought, such a way of thinking, would not
have been
intelligible or accessible to a bourgeois, even if he had the
appearance of
being progressive. Huxley remained
deluded throughout his life, and he died
deluded,
too! He was the supreme example of
bourgeois decadence, by which I mean that he attained to a relatively
high
level of spiritual thought without, however, crossing that fateful
borderline
which distinguishes the end of one civilization from the beginning of
another. Regarded in this positive
sense, decadence implies the culmination of the literary or aesthetic
achievements of a given class in terms which anticipate or seem to
reflect the
influence of the next evolutionary class without, however, completely
breaking
free of traditional belief.
It is interesting to
note, in a number of Huxley's works, not least of all his late essays,
how the
bourgeois in him is at times compromised by the extent of his decadence
into
taking sides with, or almost taking sides with, that which is known to
be the
enemy of bourgeois civilization. Thus in
Brave
New
World
Revisited one encounters many passages which
refer to either Stalin or Hitler or Soviet technology or socialist
dictatorships in general, and although Huxley never openly comes out on
the
side of these anti-bourgeois phenomena (he has no desire to commit
literary
suicide), nevertheless his persistent interest in them betrays the
extent of
his decadence, confirming the fact that, while still fundamentally
bourgeois at
heart, his decadent integrity requires a negative interest in socialist
phenomena - much the same as with Malcolm Muggeridge, another staunch
bourgeois
decadent. Huxley, however, never quite
forgets himself, or his Eton-Balliol upbringing, even though at times
he seems
on the point of doing so, and consequently his work remains relatively
respectable from a bourgeois point-of-view.
My own opinion as to the
most important side of his work leads me to single out what may be
called his Moksha
writings for special commendation. If
Huxley deserves to be remembered for anything, in the decades ahead, it
must
surely be for his pioneering experiments with LSD and mescaline, as
also for
the writings associated with them. The
future will doubtless find an important role for vision-inducing
synthetic
drugs, and Huxley's contribution to their role in society should not be
forgotten. He was much wiser than Arthur
Koestler or Carl Jung on this subject, and deservedly earned the
respect and
friendship of Dr Timothy Leary for his experiments in
artificially-induced
visionary experience. To Jung, such
experiments would have suggested an audacious attempt, on the part of
man, to
gatecrash Heaven, which, in his view, could only be reached through
long and
arduous naturalistic spiritual endeavour.
Huxley, however, was of the opinion that science should be
brought to
bear on the development of man's spiritual life, and although he had
only a
limited notion as to what the contribution of science should entail, we
needn't
doubt that he was fundamentally right.
Meditation by itself will not suffice for getting spirit to the
heavenly
Beyond - a contention, I feel sure, that even Koestler would have been
prepared
to endorse, irrespective of his personal scepticism concerning the
validity of
synthetics.
As a novelist, Huxley
had the anti-literary merit of preferring to philosophize and moralize
than
simply tell a story. He remarked
somewhere that he lacked the congenital talent for story-telling, in
the mould
of conventional narrative fiction, but we need not suppose it greatly
bothered
him. Probably it was a modest way of
revealing his contempt for and indifference towards mere story-telling. As a philosophical novelist, Huxley's
contribution to literary progress from the fictional to the truthful
was of
considerable significance for its time, and we need be in no doubt that
his
literary work ranks with the most important of his generation,
certainly as
regards his later novels, which date from Eyeless
in
Gaza. Prior to that turning-point in
his career,
his most significant novel was Point Counter Point, a work
which may
well have been influenced, in its juxtaposition in one chapter of
simultaneous
character settings, by James Joyce.
Certainly much has been made of D.H. Lawrence's influence on the
'all-round', dualistic philosophical position of Rampion, one of the
novel's
leading characters. But although
Lawrence did apparently exert some influence on Huxley at around this
time,
there would seem to be little evidence for ascribing the Rampion
philosophy
directly to Lawrence's influence or, indeed, for seeing in Rampion, as
in one
or two earlier Huxley characters, a fictional reproduction of D.H.
Lawrence. That Huxley more or less
concurred with
Such an attitude,
however, was to play little or no part in the novels which date from Eyeless
in
HERMANN
A later novel, Narziss
and
Goldmund, seems to show the influence of Spengler on
Not so, however, with
the 'Civilization', an epoch of material and social achievement, to
which The
Glass
Bead
Game, technically
If Huxley was a positive
decadent, or one who anticipated proletarian trends in his later
writings, then
I would argue that Hesse was very much a negative decadent, which is to
say, a
man who entertained a return to pre-humanist criteria in the form of
neo-paganism. Not as radically decadent
in this respect as John Cowper Powys, he was nonetheless sufficiently
decadent
to have more in common with that brilliant Welsh writer than perhaps
any other
man, including André Gide. For one
thing, they were both sons of Protestant pastors, and both of them
rebelled
against orthodox religion. But they
rebelled against it in a negative way, as advocates of pre-humanist
naturalism. Neo-paganism was of course
fairly popular in
Besides writing novels
of unequal quality and length,
Despite his generally
poor health, however,
ALBERT
CAMUS
Few
modern
authors
have
risen
to
international fame so quickly or
from such a slender book as Albert Camus, whose novel The
Outsider (as L'Étranger is commercially translated in
English -
somewhat, I should imagine, to Colin Wilson's literary chagrin)
established his
reputation as a significant writer virtually overnight, but whose
subsequent
career was to prove both disappointing and short-lived.
Of all modern French authors, Camus was
arguably the most dilettante, the one who least wanted to dedicate
himself
exclusively to writing. But as though to
compensate both himself and the public for this (a shortcoming in the
eyes of
all true professionals!), he was one of the least spontaneous,
impulsive, or
technically slapdash writers, a man who worked with a craftsman-like
respect
for stylistic details, who considered himself the heir to a long
tradition of belles
lettres and had no ambitions to outdo anybody in technical
innovation or
thematic radicalism. Indeed, so much was
this the case, that he may justifiably be regarded as one of the most
conservative of modern French writers.
Of humble origins, Camus
had a proletarian respect for hard work, as also for the work-a-day
world. To live in an 'ivory tower' of
literary
creativity, like Proust or Gide, was not for him. He
needed
regular
contact
with
the
common
man, needed to feel a part of the everyday world of fixed routine for a
fixed
salary. He was temperamentally a realist
rather than a romantic, and he wanted to create a realistic literature,
without
romantic pretensions. That he did so in
addition to being a journalist, an editor, a printer, a member of the
Resistance and one or two other things besides ... is undoubtedly one
of the
reasons why his literary work wasn't all that prolific.
Another reason lies in his technical
fastidiousness. Then, too, we must not
forget the fact that he succumbed to an early death as the result of a
car
accident. But taking the first two
reasons into account, we have an explanation, at least in part, for the
slender
nature of most of his publications - the longest not exceeding 250
pages. I alluded to the slenderness of his
first
novel at the beginning of this biographical sketch, but his last
published
novel was even more slender - a mere 100 or so pages in length. Clearly, no major novel can be produced by a
man whose works barely exceed a hundred pages!
Camus, for all his technical fastidiousness, was only to write
one novel
that came anywhere near being a major one - namely The
Plague.
Of course, slenderness
of volume isn't by itself an obstacle to literary merit.
On the contrary, it can even be a
contributory factor, albeit one dependent on the type of work being
produced
and the epoch in which it was written. A
bourgeois/proletarian novelist is entitled to reduce the length of a
novel to
something appropriate to an age of spiritual expansion and material
contraction. But if he does so on
bourgeois terms, with a
conservative thematic and technical bias, then he is simply producing a
short
bourgeois novel, and such a novel is unlikely to be a major one! Camus, for all his merits, wasn't a major
novelist. Neither, for that matter, was
he a major essayist, short-story writer, or philosopher, though the
latter
arguably ranks higher than his fiction.
If he approximates to being a major anything, it was arguably as
a
playwright, though even here he was far from prolific, and one of his
best-known plays was simply an adaptation of Dostoyevsky's novel The
Possessed. Even as a dramatist, he
would have to take second-place to his compatriot and exact
contemporary,
Jean-Paul Sartre.
Granted, then, that we are
not dealing with a major novelist, the question remains to be asked -
what kind
of a writer was Camus? I have already
said that he was both technically and thematically conservative, which
doesn't
signify praise, and must add that he was ideologically conservative as
well,
even reactionary on a number of counts, not least of all political. If he became a communist during the 1940s, he
most certainly developed into an enemy of communism in the following
decade, producing,
with The
Rebel, one of the most reactionary philosophical works of
his time, which led to a quarrel with Sartre who, while not a
card-carrying
communist, was moving towards the Extreme Left.
Like Arthur Koestler, Camus seems to have lost his faith in
Soviet
Communism owing to the brutality and oppression it entailed, not only
in the
If Camus' reactionary
political position left something to be desired from a Marxist
standpoint, his
religious stance could hardly have appealed to Catholics.
For he lacked any sense of the transcendent
and was more in favour of a neo-pagan, Mediterranean-style hedonism
compounded
of sun, sea, sand, women, and sky ... than of any Christian or
post-Christian
asceticism. In this respect he took
after his friend and mentor André Gide, whose autobiographical novel The
Fruits
of
the
Earth extols the pleasures to be derived from a sensuous
appreciation
of nature. The chief difference between
the two men, however, is that whereas Gide was a sophisticated northern
Frenchman endeavouring to free himself from the shackles of bourgeois
convention, Camus was a natural-born pagan, simple and humble enough to
find
the natural-world-order sufficient unto his needs.
Gide wrote his neo-pagan work while
convalescing from a serious illness and probably wouldn't have done so,
had he
not come close to death at the time.
Camus, however, although himself tubercular and of generally
poor
health, needed no such prompting to voice his affirmation of
Camus was handsome as
writers go and not unattractive to women.
His private life was on the whole satisfactory, even happy, and
he had
no qualms about being a family man, unlike Sartre.
But he wasn't a romantic, despite his success
with women, and he never lost the moral toughness peculiar to his
realistic and
in many ways tragic temperament. Had the
age into which he was born been less tragic or his personal background
less
humble or his physical health less poor, things might have been
different. But Camus retained a
matter-of-fact attitude
towards women characteristic, in a way, of D.H. Lawrence - devoid of
that
romantic glamorization which usually characterizes the relationships of
the
better off. He liked them and used them,
but he didn't worship them. That would
have demanded a nobler and more old-fashioned temperament than his!
JEAN-PAUL
SARTRE
Sartre
was
unquestionably
the
greatest
of
modern French writers
and the one whose philosophy had the most influence on his
contemporaries. He was in many respects
the antithesis of
Camus - a sophisticated northern Frenchman who was more at home in
libraries
and lecture halls than in the natural world of Mediterranean
neo-paganism. But he wasn't a
transcendentalist, and if one
thing more than any other characterizes and limits Sartre, it is his
general
indifference to and even ignorance of religious values - in short, his
materialist
bias, which owed not a little, I suspect, to his Protestant upbringing. The existence of men in a meaningless
universe was a taken-for-granted axiom of his Existentialist
philosophy, its
inference that man is only free when he acts ... the cornerstone of his
mature
thought. He came at the tail-end, so to
speak, of humanistic civilization in a bourgeois country and, not
altogether
surprisingly, he didn't point the way forward to post-humanistic
civilization. He remained a victim of
his nihilism, convinced of the absurdity of human life but persisting
in his
perseverance with it, if only because suicide would have required more
courage
or resolve than he possessed.
It is hard to believe
that anyone with such a bleak philosophy as Sartre could be a great
philosopher, and one may doubt whether, in the strictly academic sense
of the
word, he was really a philosopher at all.
Rather, one could argue that he was a twentieth-century philosophe,
or
combination
of
artist
and
thinker,
an 'author' and 'writer', in Roland
Barthe's paradoxical distinction. A
philosopher should really be a man who writes philosophy and nothing
else, and
to be such a man one must either have the means to support oneself,
like
Schopenhauer, or acquire those means through some profession congenial
to or
associated with philosophy, like as a professor at some university. Alternatively, there is the possibility of
one's being supported by a pension or dole, like Nietzsche, who
nevertheless
had been a professor, as, of course, had Schopenhauer.
But none of these categories would apply to
Sartre, who, following the termination of his short-lived pedagogic career, was obliged to earn a living from
editorial as well
as literary work. Sartre was more than a
philosopher and on that account also
considerably less
than one!
Nevertheless in Sartre's
case we are dealing with a man who was a jack of all (literary) trades
but,
paradoxically, a master of many. To
compare any one side of Sartre's creativity with the corresponding side
of
Camus' ... is to see how comparatively inferior the latter was. As a novelist, Sartre's Nausea
and his Roads to Freedom trilogy dwarf the three very short
novels and
one medium-length novel by Camus, both in technique and content - the
former
being less conservative and more expansive than Camus', the latter ...
both
more intellectually and thematically interesting. As
a
short-story
writer,
Sartre's
Intimacy
displays greater imagination and intellectual depth than Camus' Exile
and
the
Kingdom. As for the theatre, the
disparity between the two men is even more conspicuously in Sartre's
favour,
for his plays - the best of which, like Nakrassov and Altona,
are
contemporary
classics
-
both
outnumber
and outclass the two or three
original
works by Camus. As for philosophy, there
is no comparison between Sartre's Being and Nothingness or, for
that
matter, the even more complex Critique of Dialectical Reason
and Camus'
two comparatively lightweight philosophical works, The Myth of
Sisyphus
and The Rebel, which one could argue are both reactionary and
misguided. Admittedly, the Lyrical
Essays reveals an
aspect of Camus' creative scope which
Sartre doesn't appear to have. But then
there is no place in Camus - and probably never would have been - for
full-scale biographical works or psychoanalytical studies like the ones
by
Sartre on Flaubert, Baudelaire, and Genet, not to mention his essays on
artists, such as the brilliant ones on Tintoretto and Giacometti. Clearly, Sartre's range of creativity both
exceeds and surpasses, genre for genre, that of his close contemporary.
That Sartre's work or,
at any rate, the best of it will continue to be read during the decades
and
centuries to come ... I have little doubt, and I would wager that Nausea
will constitute his principal claim to literary immortality, with the
probability
of a philosophical work like Being and Nothingness in
accompaniment. Not that Sartre's
philosophy is particularly enlightened, or particularly readable. But it subsumes and refines upon a sufficient
number of earlier twentieth-century philosophers to have at the very
least a
certain historical significance. Even if
it's only regarded as a record of bourgeois decadence or of a
civilization in
decline, it will retain some posthumous value.
Sartre's reputation for
political affiliation with the Extreme Left is too well-documented to
warrant
my dwelling on it in this essayistic sketch.
But although he gave a lot of thought and time to politics, he
never
went out of his way to join a party, including the French Communist
Party,
which he courted for a time. One might
describe him as a social anarchist, given his active sympathy for La
Cause
du
Peuple and kindred radical-syndicalist causes; though if he was
originally a
Marxist who then became an Existentialist, his subsequent attempt to
fuse the
two disciplines wasn't altogether convincing, and one must pin part of
the
blame for this on his lack of a transcendental perspective, the
possession of
which just might have precluded the anarchic modification of Marxism
from
taking place. But fundamentally Sartre
was too much of a bourgeois to ever be anything more than an enfant
terrible to the bourgeoisie and a sympathetic onlooker or
fellow-traveller
to the communists. Anarchy, in one guise
or another, has long been attractive to bourgeois radicals, and
Sartre's
existentialist variation on a Marxist theme shows him to be no
exception. The
Although one or two of
Sartre's works give the impression that he was a loner, he fared well
from both
friends and mistresses throughout the greater part of his life,
supplementing
his long-standing platonic attachment to Simone de Beauvoir with a
number of
short-lived, though for the most part satisfying, love-affairs with
younger
women. He was too well-born, too
wealthy, and too famous to be a perverted solitary, like Genet, and
although
his only autobiographical work, Words,
gives one the impression
that life was a regrettable burden on him, nevertheless he did
relatively well
out of it in terms of writing, travelling, loving, listening to music,
eating,
drinking, smoking, and so on. Even in
old age, when reduced to blindness and unable to write, he had to admit
that
his life had been well spent and quite successful on the whole. There were still some things that could be
done, but
ARTHUR
KOESTLER
Koestler
is
another
of
that
tiny
handful of authors who became a
legend in their own lifetime, a major classic with a world-wide
reputation as
an outstanding intellectual - not just a great author but a thinker and
'writer' (in the Barthian sense) to boot.
No-one can deny that Koestler's reputation was justified, even
if plenty
of people chose to take umbrage at the way he used his intellect, as
did Sartre
at a time when he was drawing closer to communism and Koestler, by
contrast,
was drawing further away from it. Having
abandoned his communist faith, Koestler became not anti-communist so
much as
what he himself somewhat paradoxically described as anti-anticommunist,
which
means a kind of indirect communist who will oppose fascists and
right-wing
bourgeoisie but won't champion the communist cause himself. One could therefore describe him as a
negative communist, since his opposition to anti-communists, while it
may
prevent him from being a political nonentity, likewise precludes him
from
actively furthering communism, after the fashion, so one imagines, of a
card-carrying party member. But of
course the extent to which communism can
be
furthered at any given time will depend, to a large extent, in which
country
the card-carrying member happens to live.
Certainly there are strict limitations on this matter for those
who live
in bourgeois states!
Koestler, however, lived
in Weimar Germany during much of his period of positive communist
affiliation,
which wasn't the best of places for a card-carrying member. The rise of National Socialism took its toll
on the communists and there was little consolation to be gleaned from
Stalin's
Yet it wasn't just
negative things like death and starvation which contributed to his loss
of
faith, but also positive things such as religious awakening. He experienced something akin to infused
contemplation while held prisoner in a Spanish jail during the Civil
War, and
this also had its effect on undermining his materialist faith, making
him
question the deterministic foundations of Marxism and wonder whether
communism
really could provide the ultimate answer to the world's problems. But the negative things, including
double-think, outweighed the positive things in Koestler's
disillusionment with
communism. For his wasn't really a
religious temperament, and what he had seen of communism in the Soviet
Union
was sufficient to preclude him from joining the Communist Party after
he
arrived in Britain. Probably he doubted
whether British communists would ever get into power anyway, and,
besides, he
had only been allowed into
It was with his
residence in
Indeed, the tripartite
system which Koestler was to evolve with The
Act
of
Creation, in
many ways his best book, owes not a little to both Hegelian dialectics
and
Freudian psychology, which is only to be expected from a central
European of
materialist persuasion. Freud's
distinction between Eros and Thanatos, or life-urge and death-urge, is
paralleled in Koestler by the dichotomy between self-assertive and
self-transcending tendencies in human behaviour, while the id, ego, and
superego distinctions, so crucial to Freud's psychological demarcations
of the
psyche, find their echo in Koestler's rather more informal distinctions
between
what are described as the 'Ha-ha!' - 'A-ha!'
- and 'Ah
...' responses of the mind, depending on whether humour, science, or
art is the
governing object of intellectual inquiry.
Humour, argues Koestler, corresponds to the self-assertive side
of human
behaviour, art, by contrast, to its self-transcending side, while
science comes
somewhere in between. One could say that
humour stems from the Diabolic Alpha, whereas art aspires towards the
Divine
Omega, although Koestler's thinking doesn't actually embrace such a
moral
evaluation of these distinctions, since lacking religious direction.
The theory of 'holons',
which Koestler also developed in The
Act
of
Creation and later enlarged
upon in Janus - A Summing Up, a general retrospective of his
work,
extends the Parminidean idea (that the sum of the parts is greater than
the
total number employed) into the realm of human behaviour, where
self-assertive
tendencies reflect the independence of the part from the whole, i.e. of
the
individual from society, while self-transcending tendencies reflect the
dependence of the part upon the whole, i.e. of the individual upon
society, which
then becomes more than the total of its parts by functioning on the
supra-individual level of an organic entity.
Despite his interest in the social sciences, however, Koestler
remained
a staunch opponent of reductionist/behaviourist theories, with their
denial of
free will in deference to biological determinism. A
'holon'
is
both
a
part
and a whole, so
that, when considered from an holonic angle, every human being displays
contradictory tendencies at one time or another, is both bound and
free, a victim
of natural determinism and an aspirant towards artificial freedom, not
just a
reacting puppet to societal stimuli.
Koestler found confirmation of his holonic theories in the
Bubble
Chamber, an extraordinary device for investigating subatomic phenomena,
which
showed electrons and protons to be both particles and wavicles in
oscillatory
motion - now one, now the other - depending how they were viewed, so
that a
continuous interaction between independent parts, or particles, and
dependent
wholes, or wavicles, was established as the basis of organic matter.
All this is, of course,
so much scientific subjectivity, about which I have written at some
length
elsewhere in my writings. The fact that
electrons revolve around the proton nucleus of an atom does not by
itself make
for an oscillatory transformation in their respective constitutions,
any more
than the planets change their constitution when revolving around the
nucleus of
the Solar System. Viewed from the proton
side of the atom, one is looking at particles, because protons
correspond to a
self-assertive, independent tendency in the holonic arrangement of
atoms. Viewed, on the other hand, from the
electron
side of the atom, one is looking at wavicles, because electrons
correspond to a
self-transcending, dependent tendency in the holonic arrangement of
atoms. This basic dichotomy at the root of
matter
extends to the antithesis between stars and planets, female and male,
materialistic and spiritualistic countries, etc., which constitute not
an
absolute ... but a relative antithesis, insofar as the two main
ingredients of
the atomic integrity interact on a complementary level.
Koestler often speaks of a distinction
between the trivial and the tragic planes, and here, too, we are
confronted by
the holonic oscillatory arrangement stemming from the roots of
evolution in the
galactic system and forming the basis of matter in proton/electron
interaction. The 'trivial' is the
everyday plane, but the 'tragic' is the evolutionary one - the former
corresponding to the proton of an atom, the latter to its electrons. Ours is above all a tragic age, because the
pressures of evolution are now greater than ever before, not least of
all in
terms of the struggle for social freedom.
But the trivial still exists, with its self-assertive
independent bias,
holding us to the everyday natural world in deterministic resignation
or
compromise.
Man has now got to the
stage, however, where he can split the atom, sundering protons and
electrons
apart through nuclear fission, and this stage is consonant with his
urge to
break away from the galactic-world-order, in subservience to monarchic
determinism, and set himself on an indirect path to the Divine Omega by
upholding socialism. Of course, not all
mankind desires this severance from the proton roots of society, which
is why
the world is currently divided between capitalists and socialists, i.e.
proton
determinism and electron free will, and why, if such a division
persists, it
may well take an upheaval of apocalyptic proportions to effect the
ultimate
severance of mankind from the galactic-world-order of proton
determinism. The pressures of evolution
are likely to be
intensified as our age becomes ever more tragic, and although we cannot
expect
Western scientists to go so far as to deny the particle side of organic
matter
in their Bubble Chamber experiments, nevertheless a time must surely
come when
only wavicles will be acknowledged, as befitting a society exclusively
orientated towards the Divine Omega, in full-blown transcendentalism. Doubtless the proton, particle, trivial side
of the atom will still exist. But
scientists living in a post-atomic society won't deign to acknowledge
it, since
too biased in favour of the electron to have any use for atomic
objectivity.
Koestler, however,
didn't live in such a society and neither did he envisage any such
society ever
coming about. He opposed nuclear war and
was quite convinced that not evolutionary progress but a biological
mistake in
the human brain was leading man towards self-destruction.
Unless this 'mistake' was dealt with at its
roots, so to speak, the prospect of nuclear holocaust could only be
greater. For an imbalance in favour of
the subconscious, aggressive, war-like part of the psyche was primarily
responsible, in Koestler's opinion, for man's worst behaviour. To rectify this alleged imbalance, Koestler
suggested the need for a special pill to neutralize the self-assertive
tendencies of the psyche in favour of its self-transcending ones. What this special pill would amount to he
didn't, alas, inform us! But I have
little doubt, tranquillizers aside, that its nearest equivalent would
be LSD,
and that its universal use would coincide with a post-humanistic phase
of
evolution, such as the superman's phase of the (post-human) millennium,
rather
than with a pre-nuclear, and hence humanistic, phase of it.
No, whilst one can to
some extent sympathize with Koestler's grudge against the old
brain/subconscious mind, both his diagnosis and suggested remedy are
fundamentally incorrect. For there are no medical grounds for seriously believing
that man
is the victim of a biological mistake.
All Koestler really demonstrated, in contending this, was a
petty-bourgeois lack of evolutionary perspective, such as results in a
protracted
humanism for want of post-humanistic criteria.
For although it may be true to contend that man is bent on
self-destruction, one need not regard such an eventuality in a negative
light,
as Koestler is disposed to doing, but may divine in this
self-overcoming
tendency the means to a higher, post-human life form in which not man
but
superman, with an artificially-supported and sustained brain, will
prevail. Such a long-term perspective is
not, as already intimated, either congenial or indeed possible to a
petty-bourgeois writer, which is why Koestler opted for an erroneously
pessimistic attitude to both the human psyche and the means of
destruction at
man's disposal. One cannot be surprised
that his work was not generally published in the
However, in saying this
I do not wish to detract from Koestler's considerable achievements in
certain
other respects, least of all his tripartite thinking in The
Act
of
Creation, or indeed to give the impression that his unacceptability
to the
Soviet authorities was exclusively tied-up with the above-mentioned
factors. One would be seriously
misguided to imagine that the Soviets had a long-term view of man's
development
which extended into post-human phases of millennial evolution, as
conceived of
by myself in quasi-Nietzschean terms.
Rather, they would have objected to Koestler's pacifism, to his
anti-nuclear stance, on the grounds that it detracted from their
credibility
and made for defeatism in the face of the capitalist enemy. They could only have taken offence at the
proposition that man was the victim of a biological mistake and
therefore not
the master of his own destiny, particularly as it bears on historical
determinism and the - according to Marx - scientifically ascertainable
evolution of human society from class to class.
And, of course, in addition to all that, they would have had
good
reason, in the light of Marxist objectivity, to quibble with certain
mystical,
ESP, and parapsychological aspects of Koestler's late work which
stemmed from
scientific subjectivity ... as related, amongst other things, to the
Bubble
Chamber. In these matters, Koestler's
interest stems from avant-garde science, not from religion, and he was
always
somewhat closer to Carl Jung than to Aldous Huxley in his findings.
Indeed, insofar as
Huxley was nothing if not a profoundly aesthetico-religious type, there
is
reason enough to see in Koestler's politico-scientific bias a relative
antithesis, in human terms, to Huxley.
Both men were equally decadent, but they were decadent on
radically
different terms - Huxley on the internal, spiritual level; Koestler on
the
external, material one. The former
experienced spirit with an artist's personal commitment, the latter
analysed
the world with scientific detachment.
And yet, paradoxically, both men could swim, within a limited
depth, in
each other's creative seas. They weren't
wholly stranded in their respective intellectual domains.
Koestler may have lost a political faith, but
he wasn't incapable of desiring a religious one, such as Huxley to a
limited
extent already possessed. This in itself
would have condemned him in Soviet eyes.
Religion for Koestler wasn't a closed book, even though he never
discovered a truly progressive orientation but was obliged, disdaining
Christianity, to pick over the remains of traditional Asiatic faiths. This is symptomatic of bourgeois decadence,
though, unlike Huxley, Koestler rejected what he found as
unsatisfactory.
Such a valid contribution
to the progress of religious knowledge cannot be dismissed as
insignificant. For, in rejecting the
traditional, Koestler paved the way for a more imaginative approach to
the
problem of religious evolution. It was
as an indirect communist that he heralded, in The
Age
of
Longing, the coming birth of a new messiah.
No direct communist would have even vaguely considered such an
eventuality!
Durrell's
writing
career
began
early
and
continued until shortly
before his death. He didn't expect The
Black
Book, written when he was just twenty-four, to be accepted by Faber
&
Faber, but it was, and there began not his writing career as such ...
but his
slow rise to fame. Of all the writers
discussed in these necessarily partial sketches,
Temperamentally, Durrell
is a poet, which means that his literature as a whole will be more
lyrical than
academic. Temperamentally he is also a
hedonist, though of a rather different texture from, say, John Cowper
Powys. His resemblance to Camus comes
readily to mind here, for the Mediterranean climate is congenial to
both - as
are several of the cultures associated with it.
The
Black
Book strongly bears the imprint of Henry Miller's
literary
influence, and it was as a devotee of the American expatriate that
Durrell
began his writing career in earnest. It
was Miller who backed the novel, and the two men continued, despite
their
age-differences, to be friends thereafter, regularly writing to and
occasionally visiting each other, many of the letters now published and
a part
of the literary canon. Their occasional
visits were more a consequence of geographical distance - Miller
returning to
the United States following the outbreak of World War II, Durrell
living in
Greece - than a reflection of lukewarm relations; though one may, I
think,
surmise that their friendship was always, at bottom, literary, and
therefore
something that thrived on egotistical literary exchanges rather than
temperamental
affinity. Despite his allegiance to
Miller, Lawrence Durrell remained a very different man and writer, a
fact which
leads one to assume that their friendship was rooted in the attraction
of
opposites, and that both men admired in the other what they were not in
themselves, but nevertheless had a subconscious desire to be.
After The
Black
Book, Durrell began to forge his own literary identity independently
of
Miller and became less of an autobiographical writer than an
imaginative
fictional one, producing in such multi-volume works as The
Alexandria
Quartet and The Avignon Quintet some of the finest fictional
compositions of our time, which, despite their slightly anachronistic
structures, appeal to the best instincts of the literary tradition. Only in novels like Tunq and Nunquam
did Durrell retain anything like a Milleresque first-person approach to
the
genre. But even then one is on
distinctly Durrellian territory, and the work that emerges is literary
rather
than autobiographical, developing characters and plot to their logical
or, at
any rate, fictional conclusions.
The paradox of Durrell's
literary work is that it is both traditional and avant-garde at the
same time,
and nowhere is this more conspicuous than in Monsieur,
the
first
novel
of
The Avignon Quintet, which reads like a conventional
narrative most
of the time until, with the dénouement, one is left dangling in
the
literary air, so to speak, as the character described converses in a
restaurant
with someone absent whom he was nevertheless supposed to be meeting. Beginning with the account of a madness
afflicting the protagonist's wife, the novel ends with another
character on the
verge of madness, a development which typifies the paradoxical nature
of
Durrell's ordinarily conventional literature, granting it an almost
surreal
overtone and making one wonder whether one hadn't missed a strand in
the plot
somewhere. It's almost as though Durrell
were a kind of literary Paul Delvaux, whose fastidious technique is
used to
mask or grant credibility to a bizarre subject-matter.
For stylistically there can
be few authors who are more fastidious, methodical, and poetically
conscious
than this enigmatic Englishman of partly Irish descent.
But the contrived side
of Durrell's writing isn't the only one, since the four novels which
make up The
Alexandria
Quartet demonstrate a more spontaneous, romantic, expansive style
of writing reminiscent of Gide and even of Camus. If
the
quasi-surreal
writing
seems
to
owe
something to Locus Solus, that masterpiece of French literary
surrealism
by Raymond Roussel, then the romantic writing of novels, for example,
like Justine
and Balthazar is much closer to Roussel's contemporary, though
the
treatment of characters is on the whole freer and the prose more
elastic and
expansive than in Gide. It was this mode
of writing, in particular, which elicited most praise from Henry
Miller, who
began to regard Durrell as the greatest literary genius of his time.
Whether or not Durrell
was as great as Miller thought, there can be no doubt that his place in
contemporary literature was assured by The
Alexandria
Quartet, and that
he must rank as one of the finest British writers of the twentieth
century, if
only from the imaginative and technical points-of-view.
For when it comes to philosophy, to
autobiography, religion, and indeed art, Durrell's writing leaves
something to
be desired, and his neo-pagan bias for Mediterranean hedonism must
militate
against his elevation to the front-rank of decadent bourgeois or
bourgeois/proletarian authors.
Intellectually, he isn't on the level of Huxley, Sartre, or
Koestler,
but is more closely aligned with writers like Camus, Lawrence, and
Powys. He is, above all, an entertaining
rather than
enlightening writer, and for this reason one cannot place him on the
highest
pedestal of contemporary letters. He is
brilliantly accomplished in his own field, but it is one that pertains
more, on
the whole, to traditional fictional literature than to revolutionary
philosophical
literature. Returning to Barthe's
distinction between 'authors' and 'writers', Durrell is much more an
'author'
than a 'writer', and therefore a literary lightweight in any
evolutionary
scale-of-values.
As for politics, he
isn't as 'Bolshie' as has been euphemistically claimed by some people,
but is
decidedly bourgeois in his opposition to communism, decidedly British
in his
allegiance to liberal civilization, with its capitalist traditions,
even though
he lived most of his life in the Mediterranean area in relatively rural
surroundings. He isn't a man to set
himself up as a
champion of post-dualistic politics or religion, but prefers to immerse
himself
in the pagan past and retain at least a minimal allegiance to the
humanistic
status quo. His writings are therefore
respectable from a bourgeois standpoint, but inconsequential and even
impotent
from a revolutionary one. And this isn't
simply because he is afraid of the consequences of speaking out in
radical
terms, but because he is fundamentally a complacent bourgeois who sees
no
reason why he should pose as a discontented proletarian.
Also because he is
fundamentally an artist, and not interested in revolutionary politics. This is, at times, an enviable position, but
it can also be somewhat contemptible.
HENRY
MILLER
Henry
Miller
got
off
to
a
slow start as a writer, preferring or
being obliged to do a variety of, for the most part, menial jobs in his
native
James Joyce had already
seriously undermined the foundations of traditional or conventional
literature
in Ulysses,
but
Tropic of Cancer completely demolished the
old foundations by dispensing with characterization, plot, and
background
information altogether, giving the reader less a fictional account of
illusory
characters than a thinly-disguised factual record of Miller's own
experiences
in
If any writer is
bourgeois/proletarian or any novel likewise, then Henry Miller and Tropic
of
Cancer are the best examples - certainly for their time. The novel is certainly a bourgeois art form,
but it acquires a proletarian content with Miller, a content not
spurning the
liberal use of four-letter words or frequent references to low-life
scenes of
drunkenness, vandalism, prostitution, petty theft, cadging, and so on. A European, particularly when English, would
probably have been more reserved in his choice of language and more
discriminating in his selection of subjects, both human and situational. Not so in the case of Henry Miller, who lays
himself and the world bare for all to see, concealing little or nothing
from
the reader. If the latter is affronted
or disgusted, that's too bad! For the
writer won't spare anyone's feelings, as he probes the soft underbelly
of
modern life in the hope of bringing new literature to the surface, of
extending
the range of literature in a proletarian direction.
Thus he goes forward, and if the reader is
left behind it won't cause the writer any loss of sleep.
He knows that eventually the world must catch
up with him.
Virtually all of
Miller's novels are autobiographical, although only a few are
autobiographical
in a contemporary, done-as-it-happens sense.
From Black
Spring onwards Miller returns to his
Nevertheless the ageing
Miller couldn't manage to match the pace of his best
Perhaps one of the most
paradoxical features of this in-many-ways typical American is his
anti-Americanism, a consequence in part of his German, old-world
ancestry and
in part of a conservative strain in his psychological make-up which
puts him at
loggerheads with various aspects of New World life, including the
glaringly
materialistic predominance of skyscrapers in the city of his birth. It might be pushing the point to say that
Miller was temperamentally conservative, particularly in light of his
bohemian
wanderings both in America and Europe, not to mention the revolutionary
nature
of his best writings, amounting to a transvaluation of all literary
values
along lines designed to stress the importance of the self in a world
stranded,
bitch-wise, in selflessness. But he
certainly possessed a strong conservative, old-world strain that
prevented him
from becoming wholly proletarianized, and which gave to his writings a
bourgeois dimension of social prudery and down-to-earth wisdom. If he became partly proletarianized in
As a theorist, Miller
pertains more to the transcendental than to the neo-pagan level of
decadent
bourgeois writing, a fact which marks him out as a positive decadent
... after
the fashion of Aldous Huxley, with whom he exchanged an occasional
letter while
the latter was a near-neighbour of his on the American West Coast. But Miller's interest in Eastern mysticism
went less deep than Huxley's, since his temperament was more profane
and his
intellect comparatively unacademic. It
is difficult to imagine Miller denying himself sensual - and in
particular
sexual - satisfaction in response to an ascetic regimen of regular and
sustained periods of transcendental meditation, and we can be sure that
his
interest in oriental religion was predominantly theoretical - as,
indeed, it
was for Huxley. This is not to say,
however, that the proletarian in Miller prevented him from being more
susceptible to certain spiritual insights than the rather more
patrician
Huxley. For, to be sure, there are many
instances of intuitive foresight and wisdom scattered throughout
Miller's later
writings, such as that comment he made concerning the likelihood that
the next
civilization would not be just another civilization but the 'final
stretch of
realization open to the sky', which appeared, I believe, in Sunday
After
the
War - one of his most interesting non-fictional works.
A comment like that is certainly superior to
any number of speculations Huxley and other more academically-minded
people
might make concerning the possibility of life after death!
Besides being an essayist
of eclectic tendency though unequal value, Miller was also a literary
portraitist, providing sketches of his friends, acquaintances, and
colleagues,
which one might describe as impressionist or even expressionist,
depending on
the psychology of the person concerned.
This enabled him to extend his literary interests into the realm
of real
life and thus prevented the danger of fiction, to which he was, to say
the
least, ever allergic. The opposite of
autobiography, or subjective fact, is of course biography, or objective
fact,
and this came no less readily to Miller's pen or typewriter than his
self-portraits. Huxley, too, was partial
to biography, though on a profounder level than his spiritual
lesser-brother.
Another striking
parallel between the two authors (as indeed with Hermann Hesse and D.H.
Lawrence) is their penchant, at one time or another, for watercolours,
which
Miller in particular continued to produce well into old age, having the
good
fortune to be recognized as a watercolourist in his own lifetime and
duly
reproduced on picture postcards, an engaging example of which, entitled
One
Fish,
he had the kindness to send me from Santa Monica in response to a
letter I
wrote him in 1975. The artistry could be
described as minimalist expressionism, not all that dissimilar in
outline from
what I imagine Picasso's interpretation of a fish would have been. Of course, Miller knew he was an amateur
painter, but it is both significant and interesting that so many
writers of his
stamp should have taken to watercolours in their spare time, extending
their
eclecticism into congenial realms of creative endeavour.
An exhibition of watercolour art by such
writers could well prove well-worth seeing, even if it didn't actually
contribute very much to our understanding of their literary work.
Admittedly, one could
argue that even in literature Miller remained something of an amateur
at heart,
never an integral, self-possessed member of the literary establishment,
but an
outsider who could only marvel, from time to time, that he had actually
'made
it' as a creative writer, leaving the humdrum world of petty employment
and/or
sordid unemployment for the more satisfactory one of literary fame. But he was never worldly in any ostentatious
sense, and always retained the mark and character of a man who had
known hard
times and could never expect to entirely forget or outgrow them. If he was to remain something of a 'bum
person', to use a phrase favoured by Robert Graves in his assessment of
D.H.
Lawrence, he was yet the kind of person who is a 'bum' not because he
is
beneath the society into which he was born but, on the contrary,
because he has
the ability to tower above it and because that society, in its
dedication to
the average philistine level, pushes him to the outside in its
preoccupation
with making money by whatever means prove most efficacious,
irrespective of the
moral or social or, indeed, intellectual consequences.
A man who knows poverty because he is morally
too good for the society in which he has to live is an altogether
different
proposition from the one who fails to come up to it in the first place. Henry Miller was such a
man, and it is for this reason that his closest literary ancestor was
neither
Whitman nor Emerson, nor even Dostoyevsky, but Baudelaire.
GEORGE
ORWELL
Judged
from
a
smugly
philistine
standpoint,
Orwell could also be
regarded as a 'bum person', at least during that short period in his
life when
he threw himself into the garbage world of Paris and London dropouts
for the
sake of a new experience, some fresh material for his writings, and to
kill
time before taking up a school-teaching post in England.
Not that he was completely down and out
during this relatively brief period of time.
For he did have his job as plongeur
to fall
back-on for a meagre support, at least whilst in
Not that Orwell was a
drop-out aristocrat or anything of the sort. He
was
scarcely
a
drop-out
bourgeois,
although
he had been educated at
Yes, the fact of
Orwell's philistinism comes across very clearly from a study of his
works, only
one novel of which, namely Keep
the
Aspidistra
Flying, borders on an
aesthetic attitude to life or, at any rate, embraces aesthetic
considerations
... in the form of Gordon Comstock's ambitions and struggles as a minor
poet
and sometime-bookshop assistant. If this
is not the best of Orwell's less than profound novels, it is at least
one of
the most entertaining of them, leaving the reader with a sense of
sympathy for
the vicissitudes of its fairly romantic protagonist, whose fate at the
hands of
a philistine world must be the common experience of thousands of young
idealistic poets every generation. But Keep
the
Aspidistra
Flying was as much a self-lesson for Orwell as a parable
for
others, since he never again cherished any such romantic illusions as
his hero
Comstock, preferring, instead, to meet the philistine world on its own
pragmatic terms. The prospect of Orwell
discoursing on art or music or higher religion or philosophy in his
writings
thereafter could only be remote, and only in certain of his essays does
one
come across anything approximating to aesthetic self-indulgence, and
then
merely in connection with poets and novelists like Swift, Houseman, and
Miller. In this respect his temperament
resembles James Joyce, who would have been no less incapable of
seriously
discoursing on the life of the spirit, as applying to higher aesthetics
or
religion, and whose basic creative urge was also philistine, since
shackled to
the everyday world of vulgar reality. Unlike
Joyce,
though,
Orwell
had
strong
political
interests, and it was to politics
that, directly or indirectly, he dedicated most of his creative
energies,
becoming associated, in the process, with writers like Koestler and
Muggeridge,
whose political disillusionment with Soviet Communism resembled his own.
Having gone out to fight
on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, Orwell found the
brutalities
and authoritarian rigidities of the communists engaged in the struggle
with
Franco unacceptable to his fundamentally liberal temperament, and he
began to
lose his faith in communism - rather as Malcolm Muggeridge had done
during his
visit to the Soviet Union in the late 1920s, and as Koestler was in the
process
of doing, following similar disillusioning experiences both in the
Soviet Union
and elsewhere. An outcome of this
change-of-heart on Orwell's part was the bitter satire on the Soviet
system and
leadership which bore the title Animal
Farm and sought to
demonstrate, in the form of a parable, that no matter how good the
intentions,
all revolutions are sooner or later corrupted by power-hungry men like
Stalin,
who adopt the ways of the previous governing class in opposition to the
furtherance of any real social amelioration among the masses. Although the ousting of the humans in Animal
Farm signifies a revolution, the re-establishment of a leadership
under the
pigs eventually leads to a situation wherein the ways of the humans are
being
'aped', and a return to the status quo is effectively brought about
with the
reconciliation of pigs and men, both of which appear identical to the
other
animals, i.e. to the masses generally.
Hence the betrayal of the revolution as paralleled, so Orwell
believed,
by the example of Soviet
Whether or not he was
entirely right to believe this, his slender novel became a best-seller
in
Can we blame him for
this? No, because he was, after all,
British and essentially petty-bourgeois, not proletarian, and he did
have
reasons to become disillusioned with the state of communism in certain
parts of
the world. All in all, his response was
not untypical of the liberal intelligentsia of his generation, although
the way
he exploited it as a writer was certainly most unusual.
As a writer, however, Orwell was
fundamentally too narrow and cynical to accomplish anything truly great. His contribution to bourgeois/proletarian
literature was temporal rather than eternal, apparent rather than essential, and his intellectual status somewhat
modest in
consequence. The twenty-first century
will be more than satisfied, I feel confident, to consign all or most
of his
works to the rubbish heap of history, where some of them already belong.
____________
APPENDIX
The
list
of
books
borrowed
from
Hornsey Library which follows is
intended both as a record and indication of my reading habits over a
twelve-year period, beginning in November 1977.
Naturally, I had read a good deal before then, including most of
the
works of Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Hesse, Camus, Sartre, Miller (Henry),
Ginsberg,
Joyce, Kafka, Powys (John Cowper), Wilde, etc., and this may help to
explain
the absence of certain books and authors from the list in question. Furthermore, it should be remembered that, in
a library, one is not always or invariably free to choose exactly the
kinds of
books one would like to, but is obliged to select from those available
- many
examples of which one would doubtless hesitate to buy in a book shop. Nevertheless, I must confess that the Hornsey
library was, and doubtless still is, exceptionally well-stocked, as the
following list should confirm.
The asterisk (*) in
front of various of the titles which follow is intended to be an
indication as
to what I thought of the books, i.e. whether I admired and/or enjoyed
them,
depending on the type of book in question.
On the other hand, the absence of an asterisk may either
indicate that,
for one reason or another, I didn't like the book or even that, finding
it
disagreeable to begin with, I didn't finish it.
For although I must admit to having read a majority of the
listed books,
I by no means read everything, partly through lack of time and partly
through
lack of inclination. One could argue,
however, that the experienced library-goer soon learns to borrow
between the
shelves, so to speak; for selecting from between four and six books at
a time
is no easy task!
Finally, I should point
out that what may at first appear as an arbitrary placement of dates on
each
page derives from the original notepaper pages on which I originally
compiled
the list. By keeping a note of the dates
for each page, the months of which sometimes overlap, I was able to
plot my
course through the year - a factor which makes the retrospective study
of my
reading trends over this twelve-year period, some of which extends
beyond the
original composition date (1982) of BECOMING AND BEING, all the more
accurate. Also I have kept, where
possible, to the original title style ... irrespective of overall
stylistic
inconsistencies.
NOVEMBER-DECEMBER
1977
Montaigne - A Biography:
Donald M. Frame
*Three
Decades of Criticism - Critical Essays on the life and works of Henry
Miller:
Edited by Edward B. Mitchell
*The
Complete Works of Oscar Wilde
L'Étranger
(In French): Albert Camus
Outcries
and Asides: J.B. Priestley
The
Moments and Other Pieces: J.B. Priestley
*My
Belief: Hermann Hesse
In
Praise of Idleness: Bertrand Russell
*The
Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell
*The
World as Will and Idea (Vol.III): Arthur Schopenhauer
Hermann Hesse (The man
who sought and found himself) -
A
Biography:
Walter
Sorell
A
Tale of a Tub and Other Satires: Jonathan Swift
JANUARY-MARCH
1978
The Books in my Life:
Henry Miller
*The
World as Will and Idea (Vol.II): Arthur Schopenhauer
A
Treatise of Human Nature: David Hume
Delight:
J.B. Priestley
*If
the War Goes On: Hermann Hesse
The
Modern Textbook of Astrology: Margaret E. Hone
The Planets and Human
Behaviour: Jeff Mayo
The
Black Book: Lawrence Durrell
Bird in the Bush
(Obvious Essays): Kenneth Rexroth
Hesse
- A Collection of Critical Essays: Edited by Theodore Ziolkowski
*The Portable Jung:
Edited by Joseph Campbell
The
Wisdom of the Heart: Henry Miller
Imagination:
Jean-Paul Sartre
The
Rexroth Reader: Edited by Eric Mottram
MARCH-JUNE
1978
*Fragments
of a Journal: Eugene Ionesco
*The
Maxims of La Rochefoucauld
Mythologies:
Roland Barthes
*Jung
and the Story of Our Time: Laurens van der Post
*Psychological
Reflections: Carl Jung
Francis
Bacon: Edited by Arthur Johnston
A
Dictionary of Platitudes: Gustave Flaubert
The
Persian Letters: Montesquieu
Plays
Vol.5: Eugene Ionesco
James
Joyce - The Undiscovered Country: Bernard Benstock
Plays
Vol.7: Eugene Ionesco
*The
Way of Individuation: Jolande Jacobi
Poesies:
Lautréamont
On
Living in a Revolution: Julian Huxley
JULY-NOVEMBER
1978
*Nietzsche
- A biographical introduction by Janko Lavrin
Victoria:
Knut Hamsun
Finnegans
Wake: James Joyce
*Youthful
Writings: Albert Camus
Collected
Plays: Albert Camus
*Maldoror:
Lautréamont
*Literary
Essays: Ezra Pound
*Wandering:
Hermann Hesse
Camus
- A Collection of Critical Essays: Edited by Germaine Brée
A Season in Hell & The Illuminations: Arthur Rimbaud
*Selected
Prose 1909-1965: Ezra Pound
*Madame
Bovary: Gustave Flaubert
The
Trial: Franz Kafka
Selections
from Les
Amours
Jaunes: Corbière
The
Complete Works of Francois Villon
The
Cantos of Ezra Pound
NOVEMBER
1978
-
JANUARY
1979
*Sentimental
Education: Gustave Flaubert
*Là
Bas
(Down There): J.K. Huysmans
Stories
of Five Decades: Hermann Hesse
Guide
to Kulchur: Ezra Pound
The
Roaring Queen: Wyndham Lewis
*Against
the Grain (À
Rebours): J.K. Huysmans
Marius,
the Epicurean: Walter Pater
Melmoth
the Wanderer (Vol.1): Maturin
On
the Eve: Turgenev
*The
Anti-Philosophers: R.J. White
*Sex
and Marriage: Havelock Ellis
Bouvard
and Pecuchet: Gustave Flaubert
*The
Red Room: August Strindberg
*Diderot's
Selected Writings: Edited by Lester G. Crocker
*The
Human Situation: Aldous Huxley
JANUARY-MAY
1979
*The
Murder of Christ: Wilhelm Reich
*The Decline of the
West: Oswald Spengler
Getting
Married: August Strindberg
*The
Hour of Decision: Oswald Spengler
The
Betrothed: Manzoni
*Janus
(A Summing Up): Arthur Koestler
Faust:
Goethe
Reich
Speaks of Freud: Wilhelm Reich
Appearance
and Reality: F.H. Bradley
*Understanding
Philosophy: James K. Feibleman
Poems:
Mallarmé
Behind
the Mirror: Konrad Lorenz
*On
Art (Collected Writings 1913-56): Wyndham Lewis
*Eyeless in Gaza: Aldous
Huxley
Tractatus
Logico Philosophicus: Ludwig Wittgenstein
Selected
Writings: Charles S. Peirce
*The
Call-Girls: Arthur Koestler
The
Disinherited Mind: Erich Heller
Autobiography:
John Cowper Powys
JUNE-AUGUST
1979
The Best Tales of
Hoffman: E.T.A. Hoffman
*Locus
Solus: Raymond Roussel
The
Women at the Pump: Knut Hamsun
Magic,
Science, and Civilization: J. Bronowski
Nietzsche - Imagery and
Thought: Edited by M. Pasley
Bel-Ami:
Guy de Maupassant
The
Waves: Virginia Woolf
*Phoenix
- the Posthumous Papers of D.H. Lawrence
John
Christopher (Vol.1): Romain Rolland
*Darkness
at Noon: Arthur Koestler
*Hidden
Faces: Salvador Dali
*Things
Past: Malcolm Muggeridge
Dinner
in Town: Claude Mauriac
The
Decameron: Giovanni Boccaccio
*Men
and Technics: Oswald Spengler
Tread
Softly for you Tread on my Jokes: Malcolm Muggeridge
*The
Picture of Dorian Gray: Oscar Wilde
AUGUST-SEPTEMBER
1979
The Collected Fiction of
Albert Camus
Doctor
Pascal: Emile Zola
*Point
Counter Point: Aldous Huxley
*Drinkers
of Infinity: Arthur Koestler
Uncle
Silas: J.S. LeFanu
*The
Evening Colonnade: Cyril Connolly
Songs
of Innocence and of Experience: William Blake
Vile
Bodies: Evelyn Waugh
*Time
Must Have a Stop: Aldous Huxley
A
Certain World: W.H. Auden
*Island:
Aldous Huxley
Vico
and Herder: Isaiah Berlin
Robert
Schumann (The man and his music): Edited by Alan Walker
Hermann Hesse - Life and
Art: Joseph Mileck
*After
Many a Summer: Aldous Huxley
A
Love Affair: Emile Zola
Moulin
Rouge: Pierre La Mure
SEPTEMBER-NOVEMBER
1979
*Interpretations
and Forecasts: Lewis Mumford
The Man who would be
God: Haakon Chevalier
*Those
Barren Leaves: Aldous Huxley
The
Myth of the Machine: Lewis Mumford
*Letters
of Aldous Huxley: Edited by Grover Smith
*Two
or Three Graces: Aldous Huxley
*Crome
Yellow: Aldous Huxley
À
Rebour
(in French): J.K. Huysmans
*Secret
Journal & other writings: Pierre Dreiu La Rochelle
Golden
Codgers: Richard Ellmann
Collected
Early Poems: Ezra Pound
Manhood:
Michel Leiris
*Ape
and Essence: Aldous Huxley
*Mortal
Coils: Aldous Huxley
Wuthering
Heights: Emily Brontë
Coleridge
- Selected Poetry, Prose, and Letters: Edited by Stephen Potter
NOVEMBER-DECEMBER
1979
*The
Act of Creation: Arthur Koestler
*The
Unquiet Grave: Palinurus (alias Cyril Connolly)
The
Man Within: Graham Greene
Scarlet
and Black: Stendhal
*Lady
Chatterley's Lover: D.H. Lawrence
Morwyn
(or the Vengeance of God): John Cowper Powys
*Enemies of Promise:
Cyril Connolly
*What
is Art and Essays on Art: Leo Tolstoy
Aspects
of the Novel: E.M. Forster
*Collected
Short Stories: Aldous Huxley
*Do
What You Will: Aldous Huxley
*Aldous
Huxley - A Critical Study by John Atkins
Wisdom
of the West: Bertrand Russell
Swann's
Way (Part One): Marcel Proust
La
Nouvelle Heloïse: Jean-Jacques Rousseau
In a Valley of this
Restless Mind: Malcolm Muggeridge
Journey
to the East: Hermann Hesse
Chateau
Bonheur: Philippe Jullian
Rodmoor:
John Cowper Powys
JANUARY-FEBRUARY
1980
Aldous Huxley: Keith May
*Over
the Long High Wall: J.B. Priestley
Lovestyles:
John Alan Lee
White
Nights: Dostoyevsky
The
Really Interesting Question and Other Papers: Lytton Strachey
*Strange
Powers: Colin Wilson
*Dawn
and the Darkest Hour - A Study of Aldous Huxley: George Woodcock
Selected
Critical Writings of George Santayana
The First and Last
Freedom: J. Krishnamurti
The
Turn of the Screw & The Aspern Papers:
Henry James
The
Novels of Thomas Love Peacock (Vol.2): Edited by David Garnett
Thomas de Quincey:
Edited by Bonay Dobrée
Aldous
Huxley - The Critical Heritage: Edited by Donald Watt
Pornography
Without Prejudice: G.L. Simons
FEBRUARY-MARCH
1980
*Pleasures
and Regrets: Marcel Proust
*Women
in Love: D.H. Lawrence
The
White Notebook: André Gide
The
End of Philosophy: Martin Heidegger
Topology
of a Phantom City: Alain Robbe-Grillet
The
Collectors: Philippe Jullian
*Art
and Technics: Lewis Mumford
*Aldous
Huxley - Satire and Structure: Jerome Meckier
Mrs
Dalloway: Virginia Woolf
News
From Nowhere: William Morris
Agents
and Patients: Anthony Powell
*Mr
Norris Changes Trains: Christopher Isherwood
*Aldous
Huxley (A Memorial Volume): Edited by Julian Huxley
*This Timeless Moment:
Laura Archera Huxley
Remember
to Remember: Henry Miller
The
Artist's Journey into the Interior and Other Essays: Erich Heller
Particular
Pleasures - J.B. Priestley
MARCH-MAY
1980
Koestler: Wolfe Mays
*Kangaroo:
D.H. Lawrence
*Men
of Mystery: Edited by Colin Wilson
*Life
After Death - Contributions by Arnold
Toynbee, Arthur
Koestler, and others.
Martinu:
Brian Large
The
Atlas of Medieval Man: Colin Platt
At
the Sign of the Reine Pedauque: Anatole France
*Brave
New World: Aldous Huxley
Kindred
by Choice: Goethe
*And
Again?: Sean O'Faolain
Experiences:
Arnold Toynbee
*Philosophical
Dictionary: Voltaire
Lovers
in Art: G.S. Whittet
*The
Plumed Serpent: D.H. Lawrence
*Texts
and Pretexts: Aldous Huxley
Selected
Stories of Sean O'Faolain
Word
and Image: C.G. Jung
Jude
the Obscure: Thomas Hardy
Roland
Barthes by Roland Barthes
MAY-JULY
1980
*Art
and Society: Herbert Read
*Doctor
Faustus: Thomas Mann
*Civilization:
Kenneth Clark
*Beyond
the Mexique Bay: Aldous Huxley
*A
Meeting by the River: Christopher Isherwood
German Romantics in
Context: Roger Cardinal
*The
Romantic Rebellion: Kenneth Clark
Treasure
Keepers: John FitzMaurice Mills
French
Surrealism (Vol.1): Anton Artaud
The
Conquest of Bread: Peter Kropotkin
An
Idealist View of Life: S. Radhakrishnan
*Confessions
of Felix Krull: Thomas Mann
The
Marquise of O & other stories: Heinrich Von Kleist
*A Dictionary of Common
Fallacies: Philip Ward
The
Egoist: George Meredith
*Dreamers
of Decadence: Philippe Jullian
*Landscape
into Art: Kenneth Clark
Twilight
in Italy: D.H. Lawrence
Dublin
in the age of W.B. Yeats and James Joyce: Richard M. Kain
*Aldous
Huxley: Philip Thody
JULY-SEPTEMBER
1980
Stories of a Lifetime
(Vol.1): Thomas Mann
The
World of Sex: Henry Miller
*Surrealist
Art: Sarane Alexandrian
Northanger
Abbey: Jane Austen
*Hours
in the Garden: Hermann Hesse
Buddenbrooks:
Thomas Mann
*Movements
in Art since 1945: Edward Lucie-Smith
*Art in the Nineteenth
Century: A.M. Vogt
*Aldous
Huxley - A Biography Vol.I: Sybil Bedford
Art Nouveau: Translated
by Elizabeth Evans
The
Cult of Sincerity: Herbert Read
Essays
in Aesthetics: Jean-Paul Sartre
The
Thirties and After: Stephen Spender
*Aldous
Huxley - A Biography Vol.II: Sybil Bedford
*The
Nude: Kenneth Clark
Meditation:
Alan Watts
*Art
of the Twentieth Century: Maurice Besant
Christopher
Isherwood - A Critical Biography: Brian Finney
The Symbolic Meaning:
D.H. Lawrence
*An
Introduction to Rembrandt: Kenneth Clark
The
Genius of the Future: Anita Brookner
SEPTEMBER-NOVEMBER
1980
Psycho-Yoga: Dr B. Edwin
Klingsor's
Last Summer: Hermann Hesse
*Another
Part of the Wood (A Self Portrait): Kenneth Clark
Realism, Naturalism, and
Symbolism: R.N. Stromberg
*Art
and Act: Peter Gay
Baroque
Painting: Philippe Daudy
*History
of German Art: G. Lindemann
Try
Anything Once: Raymond Mortimer
The
Bloomsbury Group: Edited by S.P. Rosenbaum
*Mondrian:
Frank Elgar
*Op
Art: D.C. Barrett
*Animals
and Man: Kenneth Clark
*Antic
Hay: Aldous Huxley
*The
World in the Evening: Christopher Isherwood
*The
Devils of Loudun: Aldous Huxley
Modern
English Painters: John Rothenstein
*Art
and the Future: Douglas Davis
The
J. Paul Getty Museum: Various contributors
Science & Technology
in Art: Jonathan Benthall
*Activation
of Energy: Teilhard de Chardin
Baroque:
John Rupert Martin
NOVEMBER-DECEMBER
1980
Unofficial
Art from the Soviet Union: Igor Golomshtok and Alexander Glezer
Let
Me Explain: Teilhard de Chardin
*Modern
European Art: Alan Bowness
Selected
Essays 1934-43: Simone Weil
Exhumations:
Christopher Isherwood
*Principles
of Art History: Heinrich Wolfflin
What
is a Masterpiece: Kenneth Clark
*The
Other Half: Kenneth Clark
*Livia
or Buried Alive: Lawrence Durrell
*The
Transformations of Man: Lewis Mumford
*Progress
in Art: Suzi Gablik
Understanding
Art: Betty Churcher
*Monsieur:
Lawrence Durrell
*Nunquam:
Lawrence Durrell
*Enemy
Salvoes: Wyndham Lewis
Teilhard
de Chardin: L'abbé Paul Grenet
*Visual
Aesthetics: J.J. de Lucio-Meyer
The
Best of Antrobus: Lawrence Durrell
DECEMBER
1980
-
FEBRUARY
1981
*Clea:
Lawrence Durrell
Lawrence
Durrell & Henry Miller - A Private Correspondence
The Next Development in
Man: L.L. Whyte
*Foundations
of European Art: P.A. Tomory
de
Stijl: Hans L.C. Jaffe
*Tunc:
Lawrence Durrell
*Reflections
on a Marine Venus: Lawrence Durrell
The
Urban Prospect: Lewis Mumford
*Baroque
and Rococo: Germain Bazin
*Living
Architecture - Baroque: Pierre Charpentrat
World
Architecture: William George
Russian
Art: Tamara Talbot Rice
The
Arts of Spain: Jose Gudiol
William
Morris and his world: Ian Bradley
*Architecture:
David Jacobs
*Brandy
of the Damned: Colin Wilson
The
High Renaissance & Mannerism: Linda Murray
Graphic Art of the
Eighteenth Century: Jean Adhemar
*Turning
East: Harvey Cox
English
Architecture: James Steven Curl
*The
New Sobriety - Art & Politics in the Weimar Period: John Willett
FEBRUARY-APRIL
1981
*Art
and Revolution: John Berger
*The Visual Arts (Taste
& Criticism): David Irwin
*Modern
Music - A concise history of: Paul Griffiths
*Moscow - An
Architectural History: Kathleen Benton
*The
English Country House: Olive Cook
Beyond
Modern Sculpture: Jack Burnham
*Selected
Poems: Baudelaire
Baudelaire
- Man of His Time: L.B. Hyslop
Mies
Van der Rohe: Werner Blaser
Borromini:
Anthony Blunt
Building
in the USSR 1917-32: O.A. Shvidkovsky
Art
- the way it is: John Adkins Richardson
Dali:
Jacques Dopagne
*The
Age of Longing: Arthur Koestler
Twentieth
Century Music - A Dictionary of Terms: R. Frink & R. Ricci
*Paris 1900-1914 - The
Miraculous Years: Nigel Gosling
*Arrival
and Departure: Arthur Koestler
*The
Aristos: John Fowles
APRIL-MAY
1981
*Sartre
in the Seventies: Jean-Paul Sartre
The
Arts Betrayed: John Smith
The
Book of Buildings: Richard Reid
Sculpture
Nineteenth and Twentieth Century: Fred Licht
The
Englishness of English Art: N. Pevsner
*The
Tenth Muse: Herbert Read
Futurism:
Caroline Tisdall and Angelo Bozzolla
*Russian
Thinkers: Isaiah Berlin
Hall's
Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art: Introduction by Kenneth Clark
*Bricks
to Babel - Selected Writings: Arthur Koestler
Fathers
and Children: Turgenev
The
Gladiators: Arthur Koestler
*Life
of J.M. Murray: F.A. Lea
Irish
Identity and the Literary Revival: G.T. Watson
*Social Radicalism and
the Arts: D.D. Egbert
*Spirit
of Place: Lawrence Durrell
Lectures
on Philosophy: Simone Weil
The
Thirteenth Tribe: Arthur Koestler
MAY-JUNE
1981
The Invisible Writing:
Arthur
Koestler
*Malcolm
Muggeridge - A Life: Ian Hunter
Marx:
Peter Singer
*Marquis
de Sade - Selected Letters: Edited by G. Lely
Sade/Fourier/Loyala:
Roland Barthes
Marx's
*Savage Ruskin: Patrick
Connor
*Voyage
to a Beginning - An Autobiography: Colin Wilson
*The
Unspeakable Confessions of
*Moksha: Aldous Huxley
Politicians,
Socialism & Historians: A.J.P. Taylor
French
& English: Richard Faber
Personal
Impressions: Isaiah
The
Collected Poetry of Aldous Huxley
*Ends
and Means: Aldous Huxley
*Faces
of Modernity: Matei Calinescu
What
is Surrealism?: André Breton
Hidden
Faces -
JUNE-AUGUST
1981
The Cubist Epoch: Douglas
Cooper
*The
Revolt of the Masses: Ortega y Gasset
Brave New World
Revisited: Aldous Huxley
World
Crisis - Essays in Revolutionary Socialism: Edited by Nigel Harris
& John
Palmer
*The Life and Death of
Lenin: Robert Payne
*Montmartre:
Philippe Jullian
After
the Wake: Christopher Butler
*Arthur
Koestler: John Atkins
Leonardo
da Vinci: Maurice Rowden
*Ireland
- A History: Robert Kee
La
Vie Parisienne: Joanna Richardson
An
Historian's Approach to Religion: Arnold J. Toynbee
The War Lords: A.J.P.
Taylor
*Stalin
- the Man & His Era: Adam B. Ulam
A
Concise History of Ireland: Maire & Conor Cruise O'Brian
The Genius of Shaw:
Edited by Michael Holroyd
Strangers
to England - Immigrants to England 1100-1945: Colin Nicholson
AUGUST-SEPTEMBER
1981
Eastern Europe and the
Soviet Union: Jane Kerr
*Sicilian
Carousel: Lawrence Durrell
Dublin
1916: Roger McHugh
*Daniel
O'Connell & his world: R. Dudley Edwards
A Map History of the
Modern World: Brian Catchpole
Eamon
de Valera: T. Ryle Dwyer
*Muggeridge Ancient and
Modern: Malcolm Muggeridge
*Khrushchev
- The Years in Power: Roy A. Medvedev and Zhores A. Medvedev
English
Architecture: J.M. Richards
Great
Cities of the World: Nicholas Wright
*On
Literature and Art: Lenin
*The
Promise of the Coming Dark Age: L.S. Stavrianos
*Lawrence Durrell - A
Study: G.S. Fraser
Russia
- The People & the Power: R.G. Kaiser
An
Irish Camera: George Morrison
Prussian
Nights: Alexander Solzhenitsyn
*The
Marble Foot (Autobiography 1905-38): Peter Quennell
*Belle
Epoque: Raymond Rudorff
OCTOBER
1981
*Twentieth
Century History: Tony Howarth
Bonaparte: Correlli
Barnett
*Treasury
of Australian Kitsche: Barry Humphries
*Chronicles
of Wasted Time Vol.2 - The Infernal Grove: Malcolm Muggeridge
*The
Wanton Chase (Autobiography from 1939): Peter Quennell
*An
Historical Guide to Florence: John W. Higson, Jr.
The Chinese: David
Bonavia
Ottoline
at Garsington - Memoires of Lady Ottoline Morrell
*A Concise History of
Spain: Henry Kamen
*The
Venetian Empire: Jan Morris
Southern Baroque
Revisited: Sacheverell Sitwell
Rome
- The World's Cities: Michael Gibson
Irish Lives: Share/Boler
Of
Women & their Elegance: Norman Mailer
*Venice: Stephen Spender
The
Glory of Amsterdam: A. Van der Heyden
Venice:
Aubrey Menon
Baudelaire:
Nicole Ward Jouvre
OCTOBER-NOVEMBER
1981
*Casanova:
John Masters
The
Art Institute of Chicago: John Maxon
*The
Meaning of Hitler: Sebastian Haffner
*Venice
- The Rise to Empire: John Julius Norwich
The
50's: Peter Lewis
*Lenin
& The Bolsheviks: Adam B. Ulam
Paris:
Martin Hurlimann
The
Reformation: Edith Simon
Palaces
of Venice: Peter Lauritzen and Alexander Ziekk
*Eccentric
Spaces: Robert Harbison
Florentine
Journal: Arnold Bennett
A
History of American Painting: Matthew Baignell
*On Stalin and
Stalinism: Roy A. Medvedev
The
Unification of Italy: Christopher Leeds
Hermann Hesse - Pilgrim
of Crisis: Ralph Freedman
The
Heart of the Matter: Teilhard de Chardin
*Stalin as Revolutionary
1879-1929: Robert C. Tucker
*The
Golden Honeycomb: Vincent Cronin
*d'Annunzio:
Philippe
Jullian
*Deliberate
Regression: Robert Harbison
DECEMBER
1981
-
FEBRUARY
1982
Vision & Design:
Roger Fry
Abba
Abba: Anthony Burgess
*Like
It Was: Malcolm Muggeridge
Paris
Was Yesterday, 1925-39: Janet Flanner
*The
Mighty Continent: John Terraine
The
Future of Man: Teilhard de Chardin
*Hitler's
Table Talk 1941-44: Introduced by H.R. Trevor-Roper
*A Concise History of
Italy: Vincent Cronin
Gustave
Doré: Joanna Richardson
*Age
of Apocalypse: Barry Jones
*Russia
1917-1964: J.N. Westwood
*The
Making of Adolf Hitler: Eugene Davidson
*An Illustrated Cultural
History of England: F.E. Halliday
Portrait
of an Age: Erich Salomon
The
Seventies: Christopher Booker
*The
Age of Expansion 1848-1917: Marcus Cunliffe
*Bertrand Russell &
his world: Ronald Clark
The
Music of Man: Yehudi Menuhin & Curtis W. Davis
MARCH-APRIL
1982
Goodbye To
All That: Robert Graves
*Russia - the Post-War
Years: Alexander Werth
Culture:
Raymond Williams
Memoires:
W.B. Yeats
*W.B.
Yeats & his world: Michael MacLiammoir and Evan Boland
*A Concise History of
India: Francis Watson
*Ireland
in the War Years (1939-45): Joseph T. Carroll
*World Within
World: Stephen Spender
*German
Democracy & the Triumph of Hitler: Edited by Anthony Nicholls and
Erich
Matthais
Year One of the Russian
Revolution: Victor Serge
About
Russia: Henri Cartier-Bresson
Performing Arts: Edited
by Michael Billington
*Princes
& Artists: Hugh Trevor-Roper
Stalin
as Warlord: Albert Seaton
*Testimony
- The Memoires of Shostakovich: as Related to and Edited by Solomon
Volkov
*The First World War:
A.J.P. Taylor
W.H.
Auden - A tribute edited by Stephen Spender
Ireland
Observed: May Veber
Peadar
O'Donnell: Michael McInerney
APRIL-MAY
1982
Collected Poems: Stephen
Spender
*A
Concise History of French Painting: Edward Lucie-Smith
My
Works and Days: Lewis Mumford
*The
Rediscovery of Ireland's Past - The Celtic Revival 1830-1930: Jeanne
Sheehy
*Hitler
- A Study in Personality and Politics: William Carr
*About Looking: John
Berger
*Mussolini
- the tragic women in his life: Vittorio Mussolini
A Concise History of
Venetian Painting: John Steer
The
Fall of Venice: Maurice Rowden
*The
Man who created Hitler - Joseph Goebbels: Viktor Reimann
George Orwell - The Road
to 1984: Peter Lewis
*The
Thirties: Malcolm Muggeridge
Tito:
Milovan Djilas
Portraits
of Power: S.E. Ayling
Mussolini's
Roman Empire: Denis Mack Smith
Oscar Wilde: H.
Montgomery Hyde
*Ireland
- A Terrible Beauty: Jill and Leon Uris
*Nietzsche - A Critical
Life: Ronald Hayman
*The
Imperial Age of Venice 1380-1580: D.S. Chambers
*The October Revolution:
Roy Medvedev
*Hearts
and Minds - Sartre & de Beauvoir: Axel Madsen
JUNE-AUGUST
1982
*Mussolini:
Denis Mack Smith
A
Fable of Modern Art: D. Ashton
Being
and Nothingness: Jean-Paul Sartre
The
Conspiracy Against Hitler: Harold C. Deutsch
*Ireland - from old
photographs: Maurice Gorham
Christopher
and His Kind: Christopher Isherwood
Theories of Modern Art:
Herschell B. Chipp
*Stalin's
Secret War: Nikolai Tolstoy
Tito:
Fitzroy Maclean
*Spain
Observed: Rodde and Affergan
*Lenin
as Philosopher: Anton Pannekoek
Critical
Essays: Roland Barthes
*Their
Trade is Treachery: Chapman Pincher
On Socialist Democracy:
Roy A. Medvedev
*Trotsky's
Writings on Britain (Vol.1): Trotsky
*Reinhard
Heydrich: G.S. Graber
*The
Climate of Treason: Andrew Boyle
*Koestler
- A Biography: Iain Hamilton
Country
House Camera: Christopher Simon Sykes
AUGUST-OCTOBER
1982
Ourselves Alone: Robert
Kee
*The
Nazi Revolution: Snell and Mitchell
*My
Silent War: Kim Philby
*The
Murder of Rudolf Hess: Hugh Thomas
The
Italian People: Massimo Salvadori
*The
Secret of the Atomic Age: V.S. Alder
Crystal
Night: R. Thalmann & E. Feinerman
The
Two Faces of Russia: S. Johnson
*Adolf
Hitler: John Toland
Mona
Lisas: Mary Rose Storey
Chagall:
Marie-Therese Souverbic
The
Quest for Corvo: A.J.A. Symons
Memoirs
of an Armchair: V. Trefusis & P. Jullian
*Prospero's Cell:
Lawrence Durrell
Trotsky's
Writings on Britain (Vol.3): Trotsky
Freud - A Man of His
Century: Gunnar Brandell
Nine
Lies About America: Arnold Beichman
*Kaleidoscope:
Arthur Koestler
*Concepts
and Categories: Isaiah Berlin
*Hess:
R. Manvell & H. Fraenkel
NOVEMBER
1982
-
FEBRUARY
1983
Prokofiev: Lawrence
& Elizabeth Hanson
*Critique of Modern Art:
Frederich Solomon
*Hitler's
War: David Irving
Camus - A Critical
Study: Patrick McCarthy
*Ciano's
Diary (1939-43): Edited with Introduction by Malcolm Muggeridge
The
Thirties: Alan Jenkins
On
Judaism: Martin Buber
*Literature
and Western Man: J.B. Priestley
*Spandau,
The Secret Diaries: Albert Speer
*Dans
La
Salle
des
Pas
Perdus: Salacru
*Politics
and Literature: Jean-Paul Sartre
*The
Prime of Life: Simone de Beauvoir
*My
Truth: Edda Mussolini Ciano
*Hitler's
War Aims: Norman Rich
*Freud:
Edited by Jonathan Miller
Knulp:
Hermann Hesse
*The
Redemption of the Robot: Herbert Read
Modern French
Literature: Denis Saurat
History
of Art in the Seventeenth Century: M. & R. Mainstone
*Yeats:
Frank Tuohy
*Wolfe
Tone: Henry Boylan
MARCH-MAY
1983
*The
Hedgehog and the Fox: Isaiah Berlin
*The
Russian Version of the Second World War: Edited by Graham Lyons
*Prophets Without Honour: Frederic V. Grunfeld
The
Book of France: Edited by John Ardagh
The
Perennial Philosophy: Aldous Huxley
*Eva
and Adolf: Glenn Infield
*Venice
- The Most Triumphant City: George Bull
History
of Art: H.W. Janson
Invisible
Threads: Yevgeny Yevtushenko
*Wittgenstein's
Vienna: Allan Janik & Stephen Toulmin
The
Philosophy of History: G.V.F. Hegel
*Arrow
in the Blue: Arthur Koestler
*
*Moments
of Vision: Kenneth Clark
Irish
Neutrality and the
*Joseph Stalin - Man and
Legend: Ronald Hingley
*Atlas
of the Holocaust: Martin Gilbert
*Hitler:
Norman Stone
*Fin-de-Siècle
Vienna: Carl E. Schorske
Eye
Witness (World Press Photos of 25 years): Harold Evans
JUNE-SEPTEMBER
1983
The Third Mind: William
S. Burroughs & Brion Gyson
*The Spy from
*And
We are not Saved: David Wdowinsky
Italia,
Italia: Peter Nichols
*Rain
Upon Godshill: J.B. Priestley
Through
Irish Eyes: Terence Prittie
The
Kingdom: Robert Lacey
*Jerusalem:
Teddy Kollek & Moshe Pearlman
*Constance (or Solitary
Practices): Lawrence Durrell
A
Dangerous Place: Daniel P. Moynihan
*The Goebbels Diaries
1939-41: Introduction J. Keegan
Recent
History Atlas 1860-1960: Martin Gilbert
*Hitler
- A Study in Tyranny: Alan Bullock
Israel:
David Ben-Gurion
Siren
Land: Norman Douglas
Acts
of Union: Anthony Bailey
*Anti-Semite
and Jew: Jean-Paul Sartre
The
Cloud of Danger: George F. Kennan
*Final
Conflict (The War in the Lebanon): John Bulloch
*The Six Day War: Moshe
Dayan & Yitzhak Rabin
Whose
Promised Land?: Colin Chapman
OCTOBER
1983
-
JANUARY
1984
*Journal
and Memoir: Cyril Connolly
*Belle
de Jour: Louis Bunuel
Mahler:
Kurt Blaukoph
*Hitler
- A Film from Germany: Hans Jurgen Syberberg
The Wheat and the Chaff:
Francois Mitterand
The
Story of America: Louis Heren
Dialogue
with Death: Arthur Koestler
Les
Fleurs
du
Mal: Charles Baudelaire
*The
Spy-Masters of Israel: Stewart Steven
The
Greek Islands: Lawrence Durrell
Britain
and the World in the Twentieth Century: G.K. Tull & P. Bulwer
Irish History and
Culture: Edited by Harold Orel
*The
Left Bank (Writers in Paris): Herbert Lottman
The
Heel of Archilles: Arthur Koestler
*Hitler
in Vienna 1907-13: J. Sydney Jones
Politics
and Film: L. Furhammer & F. Isaksson
Curious
Journey: K. Griffith & T. O'Grady
*Ben-Gurion:
Michael Bar-Zohar
*Bormann:
Jochen Von Lang
The
Lebanese War: Harald Vocke
FEBRUARY-APRIL
1984
*Malraux:
Axel Madsen
Histoires
de
la
Nuit
Parisienne: Louis Chevalier
*The
Roots of Coincidence: Arthur Koestler
*The Crazy Years (Paris
in the 20's): William Wiser
*The
Novel Now: Anthony Burgess
*History:
Robert Lowell
Robert
Lowell's Poems - A Selection
*Antimemoirs:
André Malraux
Eric
Gill: Malcolm Yorke
*To
Build the Promised Land: Gerald Kaufman
*The
British Campaign in Ireland 1919-21: Charles Townshend
Modern
Soviet Society: Basile Kerblay
*Jawaharlal
Nehru: Sarvepalli Gopal
People's
History and Socialist Theory: Edited by Raphael Samuel
*The
Squandered Peace: John Vaizey
*De
Gaulle: Bernard Ledwidge
Mailer:
Hilary Mills
Beating
Depression: Dr. John Rush
APRIL-JULY
1984
*Weimar:
Walter Laqueur
Siegfried - The Nazi's Last
Stand: Charles Whiting
*DeNazification:
Constantine FitzGibbon
*Explaining
Hitler's Germany: John Hiden
Rules
of the Game: Nicholas Mosley
The
Goering Testament: George Markstein
*Hitler's
Mein Kampf: Adolf Hitler
The
Art of Humanism: Kenneth Clark
Stalinism:
Edited by G.R. Urban
The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: Max Weber
*Justine: Lawrence
Durrell
*Secret
Intelligence in the Twentieth Century: Constantine FitzGibbon
*To Jerusalem and Back:
Saul Bellow
*The
Making of Modern Zionism: Shlomo Avineri
*Sam
White's Paris: Sam White
*Sebastian:
Lawrence Durrell
*Beard's
Roman Women: Anthony Burgess
*Hitler's
Secret Book: Adolf Hitler
*Twentieth-Century
French Literature: Germaine Brée
*Earthly
Powers: Anthony Burgess
AUGUST
1984
-
JANUARY
1985
*The
End of the World News: Anthony Burgess
The Style of the
Twentieth Century: Bevis Hillier
The
Flowering of Ireland: Katharine Scherman
*1985:
Anthony Burgess
*Israel
Observed: William Frankel
*Mantissa:
John Fowles
*The
Spanish Civil War: David Mitchell
*Ireland's
Civil War: Carlton Younger
Selected
Letters of James Joyce: Edited by Richard Ellmann
Enderby Outside: Anthony
Burgess
Oscar
Wilde - Interviews and Recollections (Vol.1)
The Magus: John Fowles
*The
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: William
L. Shirer
Collected
Poems: Michael Hamburger
Charles
Baudelaire: Walter Benjamin
*Vienna:
Edward Crankshaw
*The
Alexandria Quartet: Lawrence Durrell
*The Messiah and the
Mandarins: Dennis Bloodworth
*De
Valera and the Ulster Question 1917-73: John Bowman
FEBRUARY-AUGUST
1985
*The
Boss - C.J. Haughey in Government: Joe Joyce and Peter Murtagh
*Pieces
and Pontifications: Norman Mailer
The
New Apocrypha: John Sladek
*Hitler's
Mistakes: Ronald Lewis
*South
Africa - White Rule/Black Revolt: Ernst Harsch
The
Tragedy of Lebanon: Jonathan Randal
Dialogue
on Spain: Santiago Carrillo
*Force
of Circumstance: Simone de Beauvoir
*Ultra
Goes to War: Ronald Lewin
*Diaries
1918-39: Thomas Mann
*Rabin
of Israel: Robert Slater
*Fascism:
Dr. Paul Hayes
*Saint-Germain-des-Près:
Paul Webster & Nicholas Powell
Journal
of a Wife: Anais Nin
The
Siege of Derry: Patrick Macrory
Critique
of Dialectical Reason: Jean-Paul Sartre
les
anneaux de Bicetre: Simenon
*The Uncivil Wars -
Ireland Today: Padraig O'Malley
The
Mass Psychology of Fascism: Wilhelm Reich
*The Irish Mind: Edited
by Richard Kearney
*Malraux
- Life & Work: Edited by Martine de Courcel
SEPTEMBER
1985
-
MARCH
1986
*1945
- The World We Fought For: Robert Kee
*Cyprus
- Christopher Hitchens
The
Twentieth Century: M.N. Duffy
Collected
Poems 1947-80: Allen Ginsberg
*Albert
Speer: Matthias Schmidt
*In
the Ruins of the Reich: Douglas Botting
*Paddy's
Lament: Thomas Gallagher
*Church
& State: Desmond M. Clarke
Le
Destin
des
Malou: Simenon
Memoirs
of a dutiful daughter: Simone de Beauvoir
*Adieux - a farewell to
Sartre: Simone de Beauvoir
*Sex,
War and Fancies: Joseph Lehmann
*Sex
and Race: J.A. Rogers
*Quinx:
Lawrence Durrell
*Pornography:
Andrea Dworkin
*The
Age of de Valera: Joseph Lee/Gearoid O'Tuathaigh
*Recollections:
Geoffrey Grigson
*Self
Condemned: Wyndham Lewis
*Irish
Nationalism: Sean Cronin
*On
Literature and Art: Leon Trotsky
*Opus
Pistorus: Henry Miller
APRIL-SEPTEMBER
1986
*A
Book of Booze: Colin Wilson
*The
Course of Irish History: Edited by T.W. Moody & F.X. Martin
*The
Revenge For Love: Wyndham Lewis
*Ireland
- The Propaganda War: Liz Curtis
*Kenneth
Clark: Meryle Secrest
The
Leader and the Damned: Colin Forbes
*The
State of the Nation: Desmond Fennell
*Letters
to Anais Nin: Henry Miller
Days
of Hope: André Malraux
*Always
Merry and Bright - the Life of Henry Miller: Jay Martin
*War Diaries: Jean-Paul
Sartre
*Camus
- A Critical Study of His Life and World: Patrick McCarthy
Pink
Triangle & Yellow Star: Gore Vidal
*Thomas
Mann: Richard Winston
*The
Art of the City: Peter Conrad
*Collected
Poems 1931-74: Lawrence Durrell
Enderby's
Dark Lady: Anthony Burgess
OCTOBER
1986
-
APRIL
1987
*Journals
1939-83: Stephen Spender
*Literature &
Society in Germany 1918-45: Ronald Taylor
*Jake's
Thing: Kingsley Amis
*L.D. and the Alexandria
Quartet: Alan Warren Friedman
*My
Fight For Irish Freedom: Dan Breen
Advertisements
for Myself: Norman Mailer
*Ending
Up: Kingsley Amis
*Inside
The Third Reich: Albert Speer
*Marriage
& Morals: Bertrand Russell
*Stanley
and the Women: Kingsley Amis
*Civilization
in Transition: C.G. Jung
*Culture
and Anarchy in Ireland 1890-1939: F.S.L. Lyons
More Letters of Oscar
Wilde: Edited by Rupert Hart-Davis
*Homage
to Catalonia: George Orwell
*Simone
Weil - An Anthology: Edited and introduced by Sian Miles
*Falls Memories: Gerry
Adams
*Spain
- Dictatorship to Democracy: Raymond Carr and Juan Pablo Fusi
The Israeli Invasion of
Lebanon: Yousuf Duhul
Orwell
- The War Broadcasts: Edited by W.J. West
*A
History of the Irish Working Class: Peter Beresford Ellis
MAY
1987
-
APRIL
1988
Hitler's Rocket Sites:
Philip Henshall
*The Philosophy of
Schopenhauer: Bryan Magee
Hebdomeros:
Giorgio de Chirico
*The Philosophy of Marx:
William Leon McBride
*The
World as Will and Representation (Vols. I & II): Arthur Schopenhauer
*Religion
and the Rebel: Colin Wilson
Picture
Palace: Malcolm Muggeridge
*Writing
Against - A Biography of Sartre: Ronald
Hayman
*A History of Western
Philosophy: Bertrand Russell
*The
Old Devils: Kingsley Amis
*The Ghost in the
Machine: Arthur Koestler
*Blood
and Soil - Walter Darré
& Hitler's Green Party: Anna Bramwell
*Goering
- The 'Iron Man': R.J. Overy
Henry
and June: Anais Nin
*Collected
Short Stories: Kingsley Amis
*My
Life with Dali: Amanda Lear
MAY-DECEMBER
1988
The Poetry of
Surrealism: Michael Benedickt
Oscar Wilde: H. Montgomery
Hyde
*Living
With Koestler - Mamaine Koestler's Letters
1945-51:
Edited by Celia Goodman
*Adonis
and the Alphabet: Aldous Huxley
La
Chute
(in French): Albert Camus
*The
Waking Giant - Soviet Union under Gorbachov: Martin Walker
Slowhand - The Story of
Eric Clapton: Harry Shapiro
*The
Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre: Edited by Robert Denoon Cumming
*Marillion - The Script:
Clive Gifford
*Orwell
- The Transformation: Peter Stansky & William Abrahams
Yeats - The Man and the
Masks: Richard Ellmann
Flaubert's
Parrot: Julian Barnes
*All
Said & Done: Simone de Beauvoir
*Human
Society in Ethics and Politics: Bertrand Russell
JANUARY-MAY
1989
Bruno's Dream: Iris
Murdoch
*Irish Life in the
Seventeenth Century: Edward Lysaght
*Selected
Poems: Jules Supervielle
*The Kingdom of the
Wicked: Anthony Burgess
Enigma
- The Life of Knut Hamsun: Robert Ferguson
*Man of Nazareth:
Anthony Burgess
Karl
Jaspers Philosophy Vol.I: Translated by E.B. Ashton
The
Greek Islands: E. Karpodini-Dimitriodi
Before
I Forget: James Mason
*Mao
and
_______________